


You Know I'm A Forgiver

by d__T



Series: put me to the test [1]
Category: Blood Drive (TV), Falling Skies
Genre: Blood and Violence, Crossover that takes place in Falling Skies, Dirty Talk, Domesticity, Frottage, Gay crisis, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Masturbation, Miscommunication, Moving In Together, Oral Sex, Strap-Ons, bad medical practice, grain and grain products is a plot point, lots of breakfasts, overtones of clonecest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 12:00:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15118961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d__T/pseuds/d__T
Summary: John Pope is just your average war profiteering jackass having fun after the alien apocalypse when a stranger falls into his world and gives him a different kind of crisis.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JasperIsAFanboy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JasperIsAFanboy/gifts).



There’s not supposed to be a town here; it’s not on the maps. At the same time, there isn’t really a town. There are the burned down ideas of houses in the new growth woods, vinyl siding twisted and toxic in the grass, free standing brick chimneys like the last monuments to home and hearth. There’d be charred silver in the dirt filled basements, if Julian cared to look for it.

Julian does not care to look.

He cares that there’s nobody living here, that the main street pavement is not so broken up that the trucks won’t be able to pass through. That it’s the kind of place a man could get some real uninterrupted privacy, if he wanted.

And then he’s back to thinking about Rasher. The pre-filming road trip occupies the surreally uncomfortable place between ‘idyllic vacation’ and ‘grueling work trip’. The cramped car and the bugs and the long distances are all awful by the third day, but being out from under Heart’s eyes is good to Rasher and that in turn is good for Julian.

Julian smiles at the memory of Rasher leaning back from him with a soft smile and blood slowly beading up on the thin cuts across his chest like jewels, like beaded lace.

He turns back to beckon to Rasher and his heel catches on something and he trips over backwards.

The sudden scream of cicadas is as startling as his impact with the ground. It’s been a lifetime since he last heard cicadas. He peels himself up off the ground and wherever he is now is not where he just was. The greenery is way too lush and the air is thick like sap and oh, yeah, the deafening scream of cicadas.

Something hits him in the head _very_ hard.

 

 

* * *

 

There’s a lot of bullshit John Pope has gotten used to taking for granted, or at the very least straight up ignoring. Aliens? Sure. de Facto leader of the local bruiser goon squad? Fine. Political machinations? He can do that. Supplying ammunition to the chicken shit remnants of the United States Military? All in a days work.

This, however, takes the fukkin cake. He misses cake but that’s a thought to indulge later.

‘cause right now two of his border control guards have a flamboyantly dressed man slapped down on the table in front of him. The man is putting up a respectable struggle but also yelling about his missing hat and other indignities that have been suffered upon his person and also for someone or something named Rasher

Christ almighty, what a racket.

It’s time to set the balance of power here. John steps up and slaps the man across his egregiously made up face. It’s a good slap with an excellent report. Turns a few heads throughout the bar.

The man also yelps in a way that will be haunting John’s dreams in several ways for a while. _Ew_.

“Who the fuck are you, and what are you doing here?”

The man puffs up and rattles off, “I am Julian Slink, creator of the Blood Drive, Master of Ceremonies, and-” John catches the lightning quick glance around the room- “I don’t know where I am, so why don’t you tell me!”

There’s a brief silence during which John wonders what any of that means. Identity is easily faked now; anyone can claim to be whoever they want and it’s nearly impossible to disprove it.  But he’is acting like John should already know who and what he is, and he isn’t dressed like anyone else here. The yellow/orange/red plaid trousers are a special sartorial hell.

Someone guffaws.

Julian Slink, whoever the hell that is, goes through three flavors of outrage before landing in disgust.

“Well, ain’t you something.” John drawls. “Supposing all that incomprehensible bullshit you just spouted means anything at all, where the fuck are you from?”

Slink makes an audible gritting sound without appearing to move his jaw at all. It’s as impressive as the black stain on his teeth is disgusting. “Someplace east of L.A.”

“Well, that narrows it the fuck down. Quit lyin’ to me.” John slaps him again, just for good measure. Every major city had been razed in the attacks. He rather assumes that the ruins have stopped smoking by now, but he hasn’t been by NYC in a while and doesn’t really care.

Slink doesn’t really acknowledge the hit. Kinda like he’s figured that’s the way they interact now, and he’s already moved on about it. He’s glancing around The Nest, looking far less afraid than a man in that much makeup should in a place like this, looking far more like a predator that is temporarily inconvenienced than he should. Suddenly he twists to look at John, making the two guards tighten up their grips.

Surrounding assessed, Slink demands, “Where the fuck is this? _When_ the fuck is this?”

John narrows his eyes right back at him, and then goes into grandstanding mode. “Welcome to Boston, baby. You’re in The Nest. We got whiskey-”

Someone interrupts him “-made of piss!”

-”and burgers-”

“Made of dog food!”

“Now, now, we mustn’t oversell.” John drawls.

The guards are getting lax. Julian hasn’t struggled in a while, but he’s also got a sly calculating look on his face. John doesn’t much like the look of that, so he gets down in Julian’s face to repeat his question and is momentarily blindsided by the dead meat smell coming off of him. “Hey, asshole. You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

Julian responds by making unsettlingly direct eye contact with him and asking oh so earnestly, “How can I tell you what I’m doing here if I don’t know what I’m doing here? It is, after all, your goons who brought me here. I was doing perfectly fine out in the woods.”

“Leaving a carcass for skitter bait ain’t good business. And that’s what you’d be, wearing _that_ out in the woods.” John flicks Julian’s thigh.

“…Skitter bait. And I thought ‘glimmer’ was a stupid name.”

John is pretty quick on his feet, but there’s a whole lot in that sentence and he’s still hung up on the implication that Slink doesn’t know what skitters are. And if he doesn’t know what skitters are, what the hell else doesn’t he know? How did he survive this long?

Jesus christ.

“You gonna run if they let you go?” John nods at the guards. He’s thinking Slink might talk if he tries something a little different.

“Nah. I like the looks of this place.” Julian sniffs. “Homey. A little drab, but homey.”

The Nest had not been accused of being _homey_ before, but okay. John waves the guards off and Julian sits up on the table. He rubs his arms and straightens his clothing but doesn’t touch his face where John hit him or make to run for it.

Interesting.

“C’mon. Come with me.” John beckons. The main room isn’t really the right place to do an interrogation. Not when he’s got a theory and a back room. Office. Living quarters. Maybe he lives there. It’ll do for a spot of privacy.

As soon as his back is turned, John hears exactly what he expected to hear. Slink’s boots hitting the floorboards, and jesus, is that man wearing heels because it sure sounds like it, and a yell from a patron in reaction to Slink making a run for it. He flings out an arm, just misses Slink, and takes off after him.

The sudden sunlight outside staggers Slink, but John is expecting it and almost catches him there before Slink gets his feet under him and takes off down the street at a sprint. Damn, he’s fast. John has to dodge scattered townspeople and then-

Slink is stopped, staring at Cochise.

Great, he’s found the only other asshole in the town that’s got fuck all in common with the rest of the people. Maybe Cochise will adopt him.

No luck on that front. Slink is ranging around Cochise, inspecting him like he’s never seen a grey skinned beady eyed alien before. It’s incredibly disrespectful, not that John gives a damn to stop Slink.

Slink somehow detects his approach, fading back to sling an arm around his shoulders and trapping him far too physically close. Slink stage whispers at him, apparently not having a subtle bone in his body. “What’s that?”

“I can speak, you know.” Cochise says, extremely tired of humans gawking at him.

“Huh.” Slink says, not seeming terribly surprised.

“That’s Cochise. He’s a Volm. They’re the friendly aliens.” John says, like he’s talking to a particularly stupid child.

Slink separates from him, approaching Cochise again. John dramatically brushes off the shoulder like Slink had tainted him with his- whatever all of that is.

Slink says, “What makes you friendly?”

Cochise renders a pretty good impression of surprise. “I’m trying to help. If you don’t mind, I’m going to see the President.”

Slink whirls on John. “You didn’t say you still had a president!” 

Cochise edges away while Slink is distracted, and for the first time in his life, John wishes that were him.

“Doesn’t bear mentioning as he’s a sad fuck with no power who lives down the street from me these days.” John intensely wishes they were back in the bar. Having this out in the street is gonna do wonders for his reputation, he’s sure of it. Cavorting with some Frankenfurter looking motherfucker. But he’s got Slink talking about something, so it’s time to dig. “Do you … not have a president?”

“We’ve got an evil megacorporation. I work for them!” Slink says it completely seriously, like that’s exactly the way the universe works. Like he’s not pulling John’s leg.

John wants to laugh hysterically but he settles for pushing his hair back out of his face. “Oh, so you got the bad ending.”

“The bad- oh.” Slink laughs. “This surely isn’t the _good_ ending. Aliens; spectacular. I wonder what they’re gonna try to trip me with next, an invasion?”

More people are staring at them. Great.

He catches Slink’s arm and pulls him back towards the bar. He’s got a back entrance. “Actually, I have some great news for you. We are currently undergoing an alien invasion. Right here, right now.”

John watches Slink decide that John’s not lying to him, and then he seems to achieve complete situational acceptance of this information in a fraction of the time it took the entire rest of the world including the people who lived through the initial assault.

“You don’t have Heart Industries here, then.” Slink asks like he’s probing for more information that the question implies.

John doesn’t know shit about Heart Industries, so he says so as he leads Slink to The Nest’s back rooms. It works this time; exposing him to the aliens had made him curious if not afraid. He can work with that.

Slink also manages to take John’s desk chair before he’s managed to close the door. God fucking damn him.

He concedes defeat and takes his own guest chair.

“You know who I am.” Slink says like he’s doing a dramatic interview on a cheesy television show. “Who are you?”

“John Pope.” He tires to keep the sullen out of his voice with some success.

Slink gestures for him to continue. What the hell does it matter. “I own this place- The Nest- and supply various parties with various munitions. I’m the guy to know if you need _anything_.” He smirks.

“Huh.” Slink regards him impassively, steepleing his fingers. “Tell me what happened here. This clearly isn’t the Charleston I was scouting yesterday. Too much U.S. military, too many aliens. Give me the brief history.”

“Where the fuck are you from that you really don’t know about the alien invasion?”

“L.A. I told you. I think I’ve been pushed into another pocket universe, although this one so far seem much larger than the other ones I’ve been in.”

Now that’s some science fiction bullshit if John ever heard any. “’bout two and a half years ago, the Espheni aliens- what we call the skitters- came and wiped out just about everything. Cities, governments. Power plants. We’re what’s left: rats in the ruins, scuttling about and biting back. You tell me. What’s a pocket universe?”

Slink twists his fingers together, black fingertips oddly mesmerizing. “There’s a way to open portals to other worlds. Sometimes they align, sometimes they don’t. I’m from one where a fracking accident split North America in half and corrupted everything, releasing the monsters of hell onto the surface.”

Slink smiles a tight wicked smile. “I am the product of those monsters, ascended to godhood.”

John feels a chill. What the ever giving fuck.

“Okaay, then. Are you going back?” Priorities are priorities, and John is hoping to god but not whatever self important monstrosity that is sitting across from him that Slink is going the fuck back to his universe quickly. He doesn’t want to deal with an ego of that magnitude.

Slink flips one hand. “The portals are difficult to open and use. If Heart cares, they’ll bring me back. Until then, I am on my own. I can try to open one but who knows if it even works in this direction? Not I.”

Well, shit. “I won’t be protecting you.”

“I was doing just fine before your goons nabbed me.” Slink makes it sound like he’s disappointed by John’s entire operation, and John’s trying to not take it personally in this moment. “I’ll need to know how to survive here, and where to get supplies. I _do_ recall you saying you could supply me with anything I needed.”

“Right. My good whiskey is in the bottom drawer. Pour me some and let’s get this started.” This is less an offer to Slink, and more John needing a drink. And it’s only early afternoon.

Slink grins.

 

 

 

It’s mid-afternoon by the time Slink trots off towards the edge of camp. John has done something around 60% of his best outfitting Slink for his venture; a happy middle ground between making sure Slink fucked off and never came back to haunt him and not losing any of his good supplies in the process.

John stands out front of The Nest and watches Slink go. The fool man had turned down the offer of less eye shatteringly colored pants as well as better boots, but who is John to stop someone from catching their heels in mud if they really want to. It’s none of his fucking business and anyway he likes to watch people fuck up as long as they won’t blame him for it.

Lyle comes up beside him. “Where’s he going?”

John sighs. “If I’ve done my job right, away from here never to return.”

Lyle snickers. “We were takin’ bets on what you’d do to him after he ran for it. This was low in the odds.”

John laughs mirthlessly. He knows what the odds would have been on. Bodily injury at the least. Making Slink work his debt. John was _soft_ on him, damnit. He doesn’t want any competition for most self important bastard in town. “He’s entertaining.”

Lyle snorts. “That’s one word for it.”

Slink is long out of sight now, so John turns back inside to deal with the regular business of profiteering off of the alien invasion.

 

 

 

John’s thinking- and he was gonna jerk off, but his hand is motionless on his belly- trying to put together a fantasy from all the women he’s known. Trying to stitch together an image attractive enough to hold his attention and arousal for five damn minutes. A smile here, the delightful curve of an ass in his hands there, but it all feels so distant. Unreal. And he keeps coming back to Slink’s weirdly familiar figure silhouetted by the afternoon sun. Maybe he once knew someone shaped like that? But he can’t find a memory for it, only long crushed memories from his youth, only the harness making Slink’s shoulders appear broader and that ass you could smack a quarter off of framed by the weirdly archaic gas mask clipped to his belt on one side and belt pouch on the other. Walking like he knew John was looking.

And he’d been looking, hadn’t he.

John had always been an ass man, but damn. He’d seen some of his men looking too, and Slink sure made a pretty target. Ignore the makeup and he could almost-. He’s made it real clear that the raping kind of immorality stays out of his establishment since that one time a guy  tried grabbing his hair and pulling. But that don’t stop them from thinking it.

He thinks about turning to prayer for the first time in a good long time. But for all his sins, prayer won’t do him a lick of good against this one.

Maybe it’s the makeup that makes this okay.

Maybe-

He rolls over and attempts to smother himself with his thin pillow.

 

 

 

Slink fades from the town memory quickly; the day to day business of survival and war overriding any importance of yet another stranger come and gone from their midst. Forgotten despite his mannerisms and outlandish garb and his antics in the street.

John pinches the bridge of his nose, pushes his hair back over his shoulders. Slink has stayed on his mind at least, as the most unusual thing to happen in a good long time. The man’s bullheaded decisiveness was a nice change from all the damn politics and running in fear even if he probably was gonna get himself killed out there.

The man had walked off in the direction he’d been dragged in from like he expected to live. Like he was day tripping a hike in a park Before. He’d even refused to take a gun. Jesus.

There had been lights over the forest for a couple nights now. The kind of lights that come for someone getting reckless, and getting stepped on for their hubris. It’s been a week, and it keeps happening.

John doesn’t know if he wants Slink to come back. That’s an awful long time to spend out in the woods alone with a couple of knives and some very dangerous aliens. He doesn’t know, but he’s sure as hell not sending a retrieval party.


	2. Chapter 2

John returns to his office only to find Slink reclining like a king in his chair and drinking his whiskey.

“How the  _fuck_ did you get in here?”

“Howdy.” Slink says, deadpan. “You left the door open.”

“Fuck you too.” John knows for a fact that he did not leave the door open. John sits on his desk because if Slink is gonna make this weird, he won’t back down. “Whadya find?”

Slink pours some more whiskey, passing him the glass. There’s an ugly scar across his fingers, like he’d caught a slice across them, and a bruised scrape across his forehead. Slink says, “Fuck all.”

John is pretty sure Slink was not out in the woods long enough for a wound that ugly looking to heal that much. He takes the glass and contemplates that Slink was drinking out of his used drinking glass, without any appearance of wiping it down first, and then served him his own whiskey in that same glass. He decides that he’s annoyed by this.

He drinks the whiskey anyway. It’s his.

Slink looks at him. He looks at the whiskey bottle. “Sounds about right.”

“I didn’t want to come back here.” Slink sounds oddly wistful. “If time works the same in here as it does in my universe, Rasher’s-” He sighs. “Simply doesn’t have the vision to pull my show together without me.”

“Well, the feeling’s mutual.” John has been trying to figure out Slink’s face. He’s wearing the bloody cut across his forehead with surprising grace. Like it doesn’t hurt. Most of the makeup is gone now, but he’s still got eyeliner. He wonders if Slink is making it himself or brought it with him or what, but that’s not really what’s bothering him about Slink’s face. He just can’t put a name to it. “What do you do that you’re so anxious to get back to it?”

Slink rolls his eyes. “I am the creator, producer, and host of reality TV show The Blood Drive. You _do_ still have television here, right?”

John snorts. “Not as such. We have old tapes. But nobody’s making anything new.”

“I really must get out of here.” Slink looks absolutely betrayed. “You live in a theater, tell me you have theater here.”

John shakes his head. “Until recently, we were still starving every time a raiding party got killed.”

Slink looks absolutely distressed by this.

And maybe Slink will take all of John’s problems with him when he goes. If wishes were horses, John could expand business. “So you couldn’t open the portal.”

“Found some brimstone and kudzu.” Slink grimaces at him. “I will have to wait and get lucky.”

John collapses internally.

“I _hate_ waiting for the universe to unfuck itself.” Slink says like that’s a normal thing to say, swinging his legs off the desk to the floor. “Is your tavern perhaps an inn as well?”

“Only if you don’t mind sleeping with my berserkers.”

Slink’s distaste is obvious. “You drive a hard bargain.”

“You’re out of favors.”

“Am I now?” Slink has to step past him to exit the small office.

John knows it’s possible to leave the office without touching the other person. He’s done it himself on many an occasion. And yet Slink brushes his shoulder as he swishes out.

 

 

 

John doesn’t know where Slink spends the night and that perturbs him far more than he cares to acknowledge. There’s not exactly any hotels or hostels anymore. People live in the ruins and make shanties as needed; relentlessly staking claim to any shitty patch of ground they can and calling it home until they’re forced to move on again.

And Slink has no connections, no tools, no friends. Nothing except what John gave him and the knives he arrived with.

He doesn’t see Slink again until late the next day. Turns out John is running one of the three places in town that sells pre-made food, and the only one that takes Slink’s weird ass coins as payment. He feels like he ought to stop that as a matter of principle, but he can’t be arsed to.

John checks in with all of his regulars before rolling up next to Slink.

Slink seems particularly uninterested in making small talk with him, instead rapidly writing in a small bound notebook. John very obviously looks over Slink’s shoulder, but it doesn’t cause him to stop or cover his writing. And no wonder, Slink’s handwriting is an incredible script, something that looks two hundred years out of date. And, incidentally, completely fucking illegible to John.

John watches for a while more, slowly deciphering the script as Slink flips back and forth, referencing a sketch that John suddenly recognizes as map of the area. A detailed one, if the short glimpses he gets aren’t mistaken. And then there’s another map, earlier in the notebook. Might be the same area, but it looks different. Older, like from before the invasion. Those routes are permanently closed now.

Eventually Slink shuts the notebook and disappears it into his belt pouch before turning to John. “You have my face.”

“What.” John says. “The fuck?” 

He’s still thinking about the maps, about what Slink said about being from a different world. Timeline. Something. Maybe it’s true.

Slink slings an arm around him, pulling them shoulder to shoulder. John’s slowly getting used to how invasive Slink is at all possible times and maybe he doesn’t hate it. Slink produces a mirror from- how the fuck does he do that?

Slink is definitely making his own eyeliner now but if John looks past the heavy handed application of black, they have the same ambiguously hazel eyes. The same nose and cheekbones. Slink pulls John’s hair back and the resemblance becomes more uncanny.

John breaks free from Slink’s touch, meaning to hurt him. But Slink winks at him and he flees. Carefully and with dignity, he retreats to his living quarters. That’s what he does.

The last thing he sees is Slink down the rest of John’s drink, and lick his lips. He does not see Slink leave one of his strangely embossed coins on the bar like it constitutes payment.

 

 

 

Damn him. John can get laid if he wants. He just- doesn’t. But the ghost of Slink’s hand brushing through his hair.

Well, that’s more than he’s felt since he let it get long. He’d had plenty of fists snarled up in there but that gentle-

fuck.

He hits his own head and begs for sleep.

Sometime later, after Slink has fucked off to wherever he goes at night when he’s in the camp, John succumbs to drinking his own whiskey in the dark.

 

 

 

John occupied as much of the couch as he could in an attempt to keep Slink from co-occupying it with him. It did not work in the slightest, like Slink knows he’s haunted by all the casual touching. Also, there are boots on and around his chest and it’s completely unnecessary. He disentangles himself to get a drink and not one for Slink. He returns to the armchair: defeat and also comfort is his.

“What’s it like being a celebrity?” John might as well get some entertainment out of the man beyond awkward flashbacks to crushes before he knew he was  _wrong._

“What.” Slink says, caught off guard.

“You’re on TV, right? So people must recognize you. Especially with all the-.” John waves generally at his face. He’s a little hazy on the whole celebrity business, having spent many of his formative years under trucks and in prisons.

“People know better than to _speak_ to me.” Even without the black stain on his teeth, Slink’s smile is a nasty thing. More teeth than a regular human, John thinks. “I make celebrities.”

“How do you make a celebrity?” John feels like he’s being led right into a trap and he hates it but what the hell. If he can get Slink to run his mouth for a bit, it’ll be as good as TV. Right? Right.

“Give the people a reason to adore them. Make them a hero or a villain, and then elevate elevate _elevate_.” Slink lifts his hand like a little platform. “Show them showered in gifts and gold and glory, make people want to _be_ them. Make the people want to be _blessed_ by the sight or the touch of the celebrity. Make them _lust_.”

John nods. He understands a little of it- his betting games manipulate on similar principles.

Slink looks wistful. “To them, I’m a minion that makes them great. And after that, I’m discardable. But a god is unkillable and I’m there, creating their world, pulling their strings and then-” He makes a snipping gesture- “cutting them down.”

Is he martyring them? Is that what’s going on. What the fuck. “Are you supposed to be making one right now?”

“Soon. Applications are still open to be a contestant- well, that closed yesterday. I’m _supposed_ to be verifying the route for the road race right now- that’s what I was doing when I ended up here.” Slink turns a malicious smile on John. “If that portal was any kind of reliable, I’d send the race through here. I haven’t done _aliens_ as a gimmick yet.”

What.

“You  _have_ seen skitters now, right? How are you gonna protect your precious proto celebrities?”

Slink looks at him like he’s dull. “I don’t protect them. If they can’t protect themselves, they die. They are made through fire and blood. Mostly blood.”

“Jesus.” John says. Fire and blood is some old school business that he really doesn’t want to get into. He’s had enough of that for a lifetime “Who’s the guy you keep mentioning, Rasher?”

He doesn’t know anything about him and it shouldn’t bother him because Rasher is a world away. But it makes him sick in all the ways that make him _need_ to know what Rasher’s status in Slink’s regard. And maybe find out for sure what Slink is, too. And he still doesn’t want to know for certain because if he does, he’ll have to do something with that information. 

“My road manager. He-” Slink gestures vaguely- “makes my ideas happen. He is my executioner.”

John somehow feels that’s far more literal than he’s really comfortable with and yet it tells him nothing, frustratingly.

 

 

 

John knows that Slink is planning to stick around when he stakes claim to a space in the back rooms of The Nest. There’s not a lot of room left, but he picks the prop room that has been forsaken by the other residents for being ‘too spooky’ and ‘freaks me the right the fuck out, all those masks’.

Slink seems to be settling in  just fine; John’s gotten three complaints about the prop room being more haunted than usual and items being moved to suit someone else’s conveniences.

He’d tell Slink off for it but it’s fucking funny, and more than a little relieving that there’s someone else on this side of the apocalypse who’s trying to have some fun.

Some time later John notices that Slink has patched the slashes in his trousers, and he notices that he’s noticing what Slink does. And that’s- well, he’s got more than a little curiosity about where Slink is getting the brown leather from. His supply chain should know about that, and the fact that it doesn’t is certainly what has him rustled up inside.

Several days later, Slink loads up his backpack with food and walks away. Doesn’t say where he’s going, but he’s at least leaving in a different direction. And in Charleston, that tells John absolutely nothing about where Slink is actually going or doing.

He’s  _not_ worried.


	3. Chapter 3

John gives up. That’s the word for it.

John closes his eyes and gives up.

There’s a certain relief to it, not struggling against it. He lets his mind wander and it gives him the irritatingly familiar memory of Slink leaving the first time. He tries to make permutations. He calls his name, and Slink insults him. He reaches out and snags him, and Slink hits him. He gets back on the couch that Slink occupied, and lies with him.

John has seen  _it_ done. Among the things he wishes he could forget, but he can’t place himself into the violence like that. Slink wouldn’t break for it like that.

He was once- No. That’s just disrespectful to her memory.

His hand lays on his dick, and his dick lays on his leg. He’s got a furtive potential of arousal, like the time he found pornography as a teenager and stole it, squirreling it away knowing he was gonna jerk off to it later. This isn’t easy, like jerking off to her tits was.

He has the sudden hysterical image of jerking off over Slink’s face and chest, and Slink ducking in to lick his cock clean.

Jesus. His dick is interested in that. He grips and squeezes.  _Oh_ .

He can use that if he doesn’t  _think_ about it. He imagines Slink kneeling there, jerking himself off. He wonders- what is his cock like? They share a face and a build, and okay that’s a little weird. He spits into his hand, uses it to make the head of his cock wet so he can fuck into his hand. So he’s a man of habit, does Slink like it like this too?

He licks his hand. And frankly he should bathe someday, and soon, but Slink will be worse, probably.

He wonders if Slink will expect him to suck his cock. He flips the image in his head, putting himself on his knees and looking up at Slink and

He’s never done-

oh, fuck.

John lies there, breathing heavy, hand and belly spattered in jizz and his entire brain buzzing with conflict.

Damnit.

 

 

 

The Nest is crowded. Busy night: lots of restless energy to burn in the calm after the last storm. Too many dead, damage sustained that is unsustainable and everyone knows it regardless of what Mason and Weaver say. They’re winning battles, but not the war. Sometimes it is so hard to pretend that they’re gonna win this insurrection, so easy to fall back on simple profiteering. It’s nights like these that he’d rather leave Lyle behind the bar and retreat to his bus to drink alone but Lyle will judge him up and down if he does that. So he does his rounds even though his heart’s not in it.

The floor is crowded, even Weaver is there; amiable as he ever gets. They talk of nothing, of supplies in store rooms, of work done, work needed, and John moves on.

Not a lot of people go up the main staircase to the balcony floor; especially today with everyone skittish it’s too much like painting a target on your back. He’s used it to be dramatic a couple of times in the past, but just about everyone prefers the side stairs. So John’s not paying much attention to the grand stairs until a flash of light catches his eye.

Slink. He’s laying on the steps about halfway up, back against the balustrade and legs split between two steps. He looks like he’s reading and whatever caught John’s eye is tucked up against his side. If the grandeur of the building wasn’t all beat to hell, he’d look like he was posing for the centerpiece of some architecture magazine.

Nothing for it but to drag his ass up the stairs. “Where the hell were you earlier, when we needed every man with a gun on the perimeter?”

Slink dismisses his greeting with a wave. “You seem to have managed just fine without me.”

Not even the dim light is obscuring how disheveled Slink has gotten. Hair relentlessly in his face and his roots grown out brown under the what is now painfully apparent to be black dye. Clothes mangled, even his jacket, like he got chewed on. The weird bayonets he was carrying when he showed up are down to two, and he’s got tac knives in the absent one’s places. And he’s somehow gotten a cavalry officer’s sword; it’s the glint off the decoration on the sheath that caught John’s eye.

He lowers himself down to sit opposite Slink, creaky like an old man after the day’s thrashing.

“Where the hell’d you get that?” He gestures at the sword.

“Oh, you know.” Slink says. “Around. It’s amazing what’s still in museums around here. I did a little tour on some collections that don’t exist anymore in my world.”

John doesn’t even know where to begin with that. “You went _sightseeing_ while we were under alien attack.”

“Not my world, Johnny.” Slink winks at him. “You were adamant that I stay the fuck out of your operation’s way, and that I did. I don’t take orders better than that.”

John lifts one shoulder. Drops it. “Your consideration is greatly appreciated.”

Slink snickers.

“What’d you do out there this time?”

“Gotchya something.” Slink reaches inside his jacket and John braces for an assault because it’s just been that kind of day. He knows Slink caught the twitch, too, and he hates that he’s looking weak right now.

Slink tosses whatever it is to him. He catches it.

In his hands is a fresh cut skitter claw. It’s a recent cut, hardly dry at all, but not so recent that Slink could have cut it on his way back through the carnage. He turns it over in his fingers. The tip is the brown of dried human blood. “Harvesting carcasses for fame, now?”

Slink laughs bleakly and rubs the back of his neck. John sees thick new scars on his hands, twisting over up his arm under his sleeves to where the tears in his jacket are. No one heals from being hit by a skitter, and a week isn’t long enough to heal to the kind of hypertrophic scars Slink’s got. There’s something weird happening. He can’t not wonder if Slink is some kind of new alien.

“Only following in your esteemed footsteps.” Slink sneers.

John is too tired to rise to the bait, but he can raise a hand and mimic Slink’s dismissive gesture. It earns him a chuckle.

They sit in silence for a while, John thinking a million miles an hour and nothing at all at the same time. 

“Ay, your room is still yours. Nobody will go in there because of how ‘haunted’ it is now.” John lazily supplies the air quotes, cutting himself off before he could offer his own bed. Get the warmth of his dreams close to him.

Slink smiles at him. “Thank you for keeping tabs on things here for me.”

It’s a little facetious. John feels his face make some kind of expression and he wouldn’t even hazard a guess at what at this time of exhaustion.

Slink sighs. He rebuckles the sword belt before hauling himself to his feet. He pauses, overlooking the  bar floor like he’s the proprietor for a moment. And then he bends down and pulls John to his feet.

John staggers, alcohol and exhaustion hitting him hard. Slink grabs him and hauls him up the steps to the landing. The sword sheath hits his thigh on alternate steps and it’s funny and stupid but if he lets go of Slink he’ll slide down and sleep the night on the floor.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Slink drags him through the dimly lit halls to his bedroom. Not Slink’s, John’s. Slink knows exactly where John sleeps and there’s something about that will be offputting in the morning. But for now, Slink dumps him on his rumpled up bed and he is grateful.

And then Slink shuts the door, darkening the room, and hangs his sword over the back of the chair.

“What’re you doing?” John slurs.

“Take your boots off.” Slink suggests. “I’m not doing that for you.”

John struggles with the zippers for a bit. They’re caked with a potent mix of blood and oil and dirt and don’t want to zip and he can’t really see in the dark but he gets it eventually, and his reward is lying back again. He groans, almost all soft exhale.

Slink unbuckles his own boots and hangs his jacket beside the sword. Untucks his shirt and empties his trouser pockets onto the chair.

Lays down beside John.

 

 

 

The Nest, squatting inside an old theater, has a kitchen. It had been upgraded to natural gas sometime in the last fifty years, but the ancient bones of the building meant that after some reconstruction and heavy lifting, the wood stove lurking angrily in a sea of stainless steel works just fine. It doesn’t even choke the downstairs with CO.

Lyle thinks it’s bullshit. The science man could get them electricity and a hot plate. John sold him some half true bull about self sufficiency from the budding government, and also some toast. Like most of John’s eccentricities, Lyle just accepts it now.

It’s mostly John who uses it, which suits him just fine- everyone else is afraid of the wood stove. So true to form, he’s the one to fire it in the morning and offend god by brewing coffee with water that hasn’t reached boiling but will by the time the brew is done. He likes to drink that while he makes scrambled eggs.

Chickens, so useful and easily kept. The chicken contract is by far his best contract- he keeps the farmer in grain, and the farmer keeps him well supplied with protein with an unimpeachable source history. And grain? Is pretty hard to get these days with the sky still overcast from the fallout that refuses to fall and constant raining that ensues. His right hand for fresh grain, or flour that doesn’t have weevils in it, he swears.

John’s about to sit and eat when Slink appears in the doorway to the kitchen. They’re still the industrial doubles; no place to lean dramatically so Slink makes do with the counters just inside. He’s flipping a coin in his hand and John is oddly in mind of an old videogame where coins hover on their own. He should see if he can arrange the electricity to get a TV and a console in the bar.

“I heard the diner was open if I smelt food.”

John grimaces. It’s true; if he’s making food, the diner is open. But he’s not making food for Slink, not after waking up with the man in his arms and morning wood and immediately having a crisis of self while still crusty and hungover from the day before. That’s just too much to put a man through on  _any_ morning.

He waves at the stove. “Help yourself.”

“Ah.” Slink says. “I was misled as to the service level.”

John smiles sarcastically. “You weren’t. I want to make fun of your cooking.”

It’ll be payback for how complicated John feels about waking up with a man in his bed. With Slink in his bed. With that moment of warm comfortable peace before he realized the situation.

It’s that moment that’s gonna haunt him. Physical comfort,  _what_.

Slink is looking at him a little oddly, like he’s remembering something and not caring to cover it up.

He watches Slink make an omelet, and do it well enough  _despite_ the dearth of vegetables that he only gets to make a quip about the spices Slink chooses. Which isn’t really enough to satisfy the need to be shitty and leaves him boiling in his own questions until he finds the paranoia that Slink’s doing it all on purpose to mess with his mind.

John points his fork at Slink. “What were you doing in my bed?”

There’s a pause while Slink looks at his chosen plate and then wipes it off on his trousers which makes it only dubiously cleaner.

“I am reacclimating you to being touched by another person with the ultimate goal of having sex with you.” Slink looks over his shoulder at him. John regrets asking, and also his life. “As for last night, I was sleeping. You’ve got a much more comfortable bed and I aim to be in it.

“I’m  _not_ a homosexual, Slink.”

“Don’t have to be a homosexual to enjoy it.” Slink says mildly as he sits on the counter beside John.

Their knees are touching and John _knows_ it’s deliberate and if he moves away now he’ll just look like a coward. Given impetus by all the turmoil inside him, the tiny touch burns and blooms all up and down his leg. “So this is a game to you.”

Slink has the manners to swallow before he speaks. “I don’t know how long I’m gonna be here and I’m bored. Might as well get into the bed of the only real power I see around here.”

 _Christ_ . He feels rather like Slink pulled the rug out from under him and then hit him with it.

John slides off the counter to go scrub down his plate. “That doesn’t actually make me like you or want this any more.”

“I don’t believe you actually want me to stop.”

Slink is right, but he shouldn’t say it. Not like that. “Miss me with the intrigue. Let’s go straight to the blowjobs.”

Good job, John. Way to escalate.

Slink snickers. “Well, in that case.”

John holds up a finger. “Nuh-uh. Not in the kitchen. That’s nasty.”

 

 

He spends the rest of the day being anxious and dedicatedly checking Slink out every time they cross paths. He’s trying to figure out where Slink puts his junk in trousers that tight.

Slink catches him looking and winks and he winks back at him and he doesn’t know what he agreed to.

He burns with  _something_.

 

The Nest might be his headquarters, his storage depot, his safehouse, but the  _bus_ . The bus is where most of his meddling starts. Watching the people come and go. Heckling and being heckled in turn. Keeping tabs on everyone and everything.

John rather likes it up here, being regal. He’s appointed it to reflect this.

And then Slink joins him on the beaten up settee; occupies his space.

“Behold, my kingdom.” John gestures.

Slink beholds. “And a bountiful one it is.”

“Well,” John drawls, “Were that I could make cornbread instead of trading it all for chickens.”

Slink turns to look at him. Places his hand on John’s thigh. The warm touch burns against the cool air. “Embezzle some corn.”

John holds the serious look, refusing to acknowledge the touch, and then cracks into laughter. “I employ myself. That’s just, uh, profit.”

“Exactly!” Slink squeezes his leg. John almost swallows air.

John gestures at Slink’s hand. “What are you doing? If it’s supposed to titillate, you’re just being weird.”

Slink slides his hand further up the inside of his thigh. “Thought you didn’t like me using you for entertainment?”

John shivers. “Thought maybe it don’t matter if you’re bored and I’m horny.”

Slink rubs his leg a little, getting exactly the reaction he wants and that John is afraid of. “I recall you saying that we could go directly to the blowjobs.”

John brushes hair out of his face, tucking it behind an ear. It’s as close as he’s got to a nervous habit. “If you’re gonna feel me up, let’s go somewhere with a little privacy, yeah?”

“Lead on.”

 

John leads him to his quarters. In the light of day they’re as  dingy as everything else that remains. Every flat surface is cluttered with parts and weapons and bits that he’s collected since he set up shop here. He feels oddly defensive about it, like he should have picked up or something. But this isn’t a date, he doesn’t have to impress; all the rules are off.

Slink is looking at him like,  _well?_

John feels like he’ll choke on his fear and anticipation if he doesn’t do something. He turns towards Slink, steps towards him- there’s a hand on the back of his head and then they’re kissing and it’s weird but he knows how to do this.

He realizes that Slink was distracting him when he’s pushed over and they fall together onto his bed. He’s laughing, breathless; swats at Slink who’s grinning down at him.

John had done this to women, pulls them against him and tipping over to surprise them past the starting inertia,  _yes we’re gonna fuck c’mon_ and he’d be mad about it being used on him but it’s working so well. So he kisses Slink.

Slink does  _something_ , rearranges how he’s laying on John until there’s pressure all across his crotch but also the full body contact? Damn. He hugs Slink tightly before running his hands down to squeeze his ass.

Slink squeaks like he’s surprised. It’s  _really_ endearing.

John rolls them over, refusing to stay pinned for long. Slink presses up against him, hot and lively and hungry. He cups the side of Slink’s face, kissing him again and sliding his hand lower. Tugs Slink’s collar aside to kiss his throat and collarbone.

“Hey. Slink, you’re wearing too much.”

“Please, call me Julian.” Slink demurres. 

“Uh, right.” What’s he gonna do with his carefully cultivated distance from the personhood of his problems now? “Why is it that we’ve both survived an apocalypse but _you_ choose clothing with more buttons than is entirely reasonable and literally _everyone else_ has opted for fewer buttons?”

“Ever got your dick caught in a flesh eating zipper?” Slink asks archly. “No, I didn’t think so."

“I- I don’t know what the means and I _don’t want to._ ” John’s got Julian’s shirt open _finally_ and- “What the hell happened to you?”

Slink blinks up at him like he has any right to be innocent. “Flesh eating zipper?”

“No, that was your dick, keep up.” John rubs a hand across Julian’s ribs, over a patch of reddish scarring that tears down over the side of his belly. There’s more; one like a stain on his centerline below his bellybutton, hypertrophic ones around his shoulders. He’s kind of a mess.

“None of your business, John.”

“Right,  _right_ .” John sits up and strips off his own shirt.

Julian whistles at him and he blushes. What the hell? “That’s no fair!”

“Yeah.” Slink replies, sliding his hands over John’s hips, dipping his thumbs under John’s belt. His feeling concentrates to two burning points and the intensity of it hits him like a blackjack to the head. 

He’s  _missed_ -

“Oh my god.” Slink has undone his belt and fly, is pulling his cock out so that it pokes up against his belly and it’s so much, so fast. “Julian.”

Julian runs a finger over the exposed head of his cock and John  _twitches_ . Curls forward, one hand on Julian’s chest and one on the bed and hair hanging down in Julian’s face. He wants to push against Julian’s hand, rut against him he  _wants_ \- and he is in the worst position to enact any of those desires.

And Julian is giving him a curious look, just toying with John’s dick.

“Come on  _come on_ ” John is saying, far more desperate than he ever thought he’d be. Julian obligingly lifts his hips for John to undo his trousers and pull them down.

But he’s smooth, the centerline stain just widening and darkening as it crawls towards the point of his pelvis. John can feel the heat radiating off of him, and slickness too as he brushes a hand over this latest surprise. “ _What_?”

Slink gives him a hard edged look. “Don’t let me stop you.”

John chokes. Finds his tongue. “You weren’t kidding about- about the zipper.”

Julian snorts. “You’re still gonna suck my cock, regardless.”

He threads a hand up through John’s hair, bunching it up to the back of his head and oddly, when Julian pulls, it doesn’t hurt at all.

He goes.

He goes down. He lets Julian press his mouth to his crotch, guiding him until he figures out a strange diagonal licking pattern. And then Julian gathers up all of his hair into a bundle and holds it for him and is just so disconcertingly  _helpful_ . It only makes it more bizarre, that he’s got his mouth on some guy’s junk and his hair is being  _held_ for it. The mental gymnastics he’d doing are- he focuses on keeping his beard off of what is undoubtedly sensitive skin from the way Julian is moaning for it, and ain’t that a trip.

Right around the time his jaw starts to ache, John comes up for air.

“Hey, hey Julian-” And Julian is looking down at him, eyes dark and barely open and mouth open and breathing heavy, holy shit that’s a  _look_ . John presses the heel of his palm to Julian’s perineum, curls his fingers over the point of his pelvis and digs in just a little. Julian moans and presses down against his hand, so he pushes back a little harder.

“lemme-” He pushes again, putting his arm into it and starting a pattern like fucking.

“Come  _on_ .” Julian pulls on his hair, careless and painful this time. John slides up and into a kiss.

Julian is clearly trying to taste himself on John’s face, licking at every place he’d accidentally gotten Julian’s wetness on. It’s a little weird but also kind of really hot the way the bitterness tastes different in Julian’s mouth. And anyway John’s kicked his pants off so he can spread his hips over Julian’s and line his cock up with Julian’s and press them together and  _fuck_

Suddenly his head is free so he can uncrik his neck and Julian has one hand on his chest and the other slipped down to angle John’s dick against him as he likes.

“God, fuck, Julian-” he says. His entire body is buzzing, he doesn’t know what he means to say, he’s just-

Julian has the smug audacity to say, “ _yes_ ”.

“Hey- damnit. Hey.” John pants. “How do you come. What do you need?”

“What, tired already?” Julian manages to snark, but he slips his hand off of John’s back and- John has no idea what he does with it because he can neither see or feel it. But Julian tips his head back and to the side, exposing his throat, inviting

So John dips down and kisses his check and under his ear and his throat before he bites and holy shit that has to be what does it because Julian is twitching and gasping under him and then he follows a few thrusts later, white out with the intensity of it.

He gets two more thrusts in, blindly chasing the feeling before Julian shoves him off.

He’s sticky and sweaty and overall disgusting but he’s also happy and floppy and it’s fantastic.

Julian makes a disgusted sound. “Towel.”

“-inna minute.” John mumbles.

“ _Now_ . It’s your cum that’s gonna go on your bed.”

“On the chair, your side.” John groans. “Just reach for it, it’s there.”

Julian must have successfully grabbed it and cleaned himself up to some level of satisfaction because hazy minutes later the towel lands all gross on his belly. Which is just as gross, really. “You’re such a jerk.”

“Yep.” Julian is radiating this immense satisfaction, and okay, John’s into it.


	4. Chapter 4

He’d built two bullets for the demonstration, gambling that he would borrow the two guns that he borrowed, that he’d have one for each. And he’d won, somehow, and gotten a contract that would keep him in town and up in everyone’s business.

He’d built the first two by pulling the slug from the casing with pliers and prayer and carefully cramming a little alloy lump in its place. Now he has a machine that pulls the bullet from the casing smooth as anything and doesn’t put his hands in the path of catastrophe.

There were no ammunition manufacturers in Charleston at the time of the fall. No tools to appropriate- he can’t make the casings to the spec that modern guns require. Two years later, the dozens of gun shops have been scoured clean of ammunition, of tools, of gunpowder. Musket balls are easy to make. AK rounds are not. The military hadn’t thought that was funny.

Tom thought it was fucking hilarious, and then demanded that he do better in the way that he does that makes John want to do better.

So now he harvests brass and powder from perfectly good rounds- he’s got a bunch of them lined up like little cups on the workbench- and discards the copper. Who would have guessed that copper would be worthless? He’s engrossed in the work, alone in the firehouse kitchen that the assembly line is set up in. Sundays are still sacred as a day of rest, even if faith is a little thin on the ground.

And working with gunpowder is as close to god as he wants to be, perhaps.

At the very least, it focuses the mind. He thinks about optimization- a single round takes about ten minutes to make, and a fully automatic weapon can fire a round every third of a second. People get trigger happy around mechs.

The revolver might be an impractical weapon, but the large caliber and being forced to pick his shots has kept him alive.

Which is all for fucking naught when he looks up from the last casing and startles at the sight of Slink leaning against the bench opposite. “How long have you been there?”

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

“I’ve got work to do.” John sets the rack of casings down beside the other tool he’d built for this, the one that presses the alien alloy slugs into their new casings to make a bullet.

“I see that.” Slink says, graciously not mentioning the time of day he’s doing work at. “What’s with all the antagonism?”

John gestures at the rows of tools. “I know you might not have noticed, but there _is_ an alien invasion going on and sometimes I do things about it.”

Slink does not fall for the misdirection. “Having regrets?”

John slots a casing and a bullet into the press. He slowly pulls the lever until it hits the stop and releases it. He transfers the complete round to a padded storage box.

His thoughts summarize, “Bitch, I might be.”

“Why? It was good.” Slink is giving him an open, curious look. John doesn’t buy one bit of it, but wants the entire thing.

How does  _good_ change anything?  _Julian_ has a boyfriend when he returns to his world, and John has cold brass. He wants to lash out, but in here of all places to make a spark…

“I was  _married_. I’m not gay, Slink.” And that wasn’t exactly what he meant to say, either.

His wife had divorced him, taken the kids, and it was the best thing she’d ever done for any of them. Told him that if he was gonna keep playing, he could do it elsewhere. Hadn’t said it so nice, either.

Julian is playing, and Julian is somewhere inside the wall the apocalypse had reinforced around him; he’s in too deep like shards of glass.

“So was I. That doesn’t change anything; you could be bisexual.”

“Wait. You were married.” John has this absolutely bizarre image of Slink in a wedding dress, like Deadpool in the comics before he manages to latch onto the important information in that sentence. John gestures at him with a completed round. “The fuck is ‘bisexual’.”

“It _means_ that a person is attracted to both men and women. Not always in equal measure.” Julian grins, oblivious to John’s inner rat-in-a-bucket scrambling. “For instance, Rasher-”

“Would you shut the fuck up about  _Rasher_?”

Slink raises his hands, acquiescing.

John ejects another completed round from the machine. The work is smooth, repetitive, calming. What he came here for. Slink watches him as he makes another round.

“You know-” The press makes an abrupt click and Slink twitches. “-I made food.”

“So why are you here?”

“To see if you wanted any.”

“Why are you pretending?” John snips back.

“I want to.”“Stop it.”

Slink turns and leaves, and John is left with cold brass.

 

 

That night he takes a candle and under the flickering light, the masks hanging on the prop room wall stare back at him with flat living eyes.

Slink’s meager collection of personal belongings is gone.

The hollow pit in his belly grows by the gravelly shovelful. He’d done it. He’d gotten rid of Slink.

It’s no victory.

 

 

 

Sleep takes him before he can go completely flat inside, and only just barely. It’s an awful sleep with the offset of daytime and the weird illusory feeling that it should be a Saturday morning but Saturday isn’t real anymore but he’s going to regret sleeping anyway because something’s gonna go wrong.

It gets worse as he slides through time, grey light, grey walls, he lands on his back in the mud looking up at the grey sky and a skitter.  _Click click click._ He’s screaming like an animal, scared blind and his-  _Click click click_ \- pistol is empty and useless. The skitter steps over him, focusing on the people behind him and he can’t reach his knife to cut at its belly - he can’t reach his knife - he can’t-

He opens his eyes and he’s on the porch of his first house and he knows with the certainty of the night sky over his head that they’re all dead, even him, but Laura is calling his name. He goes inside, and there she is. Beautiful and far far too good for him, so he comes up behind her to hug her and bury his face in her hair, even knowing that she’ll reprimand him later for the road dirt ground into his hands.

She laughs and he slides through time into the courthouse, and she laughs and he’s calling her from the payphone in the back of a diner saying  _I fucked up I’m so sorry_ and she laughs at him.

He’s burning up and he tries to push the blanket away, but her hands stop him and he rolls over to kiss her to distract her. The kiss is soft and when he opens his eyes, Julian’s looking back at him, and when he opens his eyes, the other side of his bed is  empty and it’s all his fault. The weary worn grey walls of his room feel as oppressive any jail cell that he’s been in.

 

 

 

The site where the portal is supposed to be is far enough out that John wishes he’d brought one of the dirt bikes. But instead he’s putting miles on his boots and wearing tracks in his mind. Is what it is, he supposes, but he’s out here to decide if Julian is lying about the portal.

Right where his men said there would be is a ring of scorched kudzu. It barely smells burned after all this rain.

It fills him with dread and anger- he’s acting like Julian’s gonna stay but here’s the evidence that they don’t know shit. That he doesn’t know a damn thing except for what Julian tells him.

And well, Julian is playing a game. A storyteller.

A liar.

John walks the perimeter of the clearing. The damaged greenery is well on its way to regrowing- if the portal caused the damage, then it hasn’t opened since it spit Julian out. Some part of John likes that, like the passage of time actually changes the probability of the portal opening on any given day. Some part of John is fucking wrong.

He lashes out at the vines.

With it this far out, he doesn’t even know how they’d know if it opened. Nobody’s watching it. They can’t put a camera on it.

He has to act like Julian’s here to stay, and believe he’s leaving forever the next minute. Has to.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, and anyway, there’s nothing here. He doesn’t even know where Julian is to fetch him from if the portal opens.

Still, he instinctively avoids the center of the clearing as he paces around it.


	5. Chapter 5

Time doesn’t really exist anymore. Sure, some people track it- digital watches don’t die- but mostly things happen when they happen and oh-eight-hundred is reserved for the dregs of the military. There’s no clocks here; the only light is provided by the weak wavery glow of the lantern and the embers in the belly of the stove.

John sits on a stool, surveying the kitchen from the depths of a deep slouch. He’s not really looking at anything because the flickering light drives all the stainless steel edges of the old equipment into incomprehensible reflected lines and hell, if time was real, it would be ass oclock in the morning anyway.

He takes a sip of his tepid coffee, and watches Julian sleep.

Julian is laying across the drain board of one of the big sinks. He looks peaceful but the stainless steel under him is streaked with blood and he’s covered in blood and bruising and scars knitting him together far more quickly than is normal for any human.

If John blinks real slow, he can see Julian healing in little snapshots.

He takes a sip of his  _really_ tepid coffee, swirls the dregs around, and tries not to think about Julian demanding to be worshiped as a god before lapsing into a fever so hot he should have cooked himself into brain damage.

The fever lapsed faster than John could source ice from the hospital. And now he’s asleep in John’s kitchen like he didn’t almost get eviscerated trying to fence a mech. Or whatever he was doing after John annoyed him out of town.

He’d known that there was something off about Julian since the start. First, the makeup and the mannerisms. And then the insane stories he told of vampire cars and monsters. Even how he walked around like he owned the place and looked uncomfortably like John himself. And John humored him because he was fascinated and repulsed and when Julian touched him, he could feel all the jagged pieces inside him shift.

Julian showed up at his door, ragged and unsteady on his feet, asking for help. Like John hadn’t driven him out, and then eaten himself alive with the doubt and the guilt of it.

John drinks the last of his miserable fucking coffee. It’s not even real coffee; it’s made out of chicory root.

Julian showed up at his door, demanding help after John had driven him out with a cold shoulder and unwarranted aggression. John had told him fuck off, Julian had called him a spineless peon and a fool to boot and then nearly collapsed. John had to nearly carry him to the kitchen, the only place he could render the necessary amount of help.

He’s weak for helping strangers, isn’t he?

Especially one that told him he was being used right to his face, and he let have carnal knowledge anyway. Lyle would have the choicest words for him, if he knew. John’s got them for himself, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t need Lyle’s input on this one; he’d gotten on his knees and prayed for redemption, for a man who was always going to leave to return, and dreamed of kneeling for him.

Over the last hour or so John had watched Julian’s body claw itself together like something out of a horror movie but if Julian’s a god of anything, he’s a god of sin and blasphemy.

John rinses out his battered tin cup before going to check on Julian.

Julian is breathing quickly and shallowly. If he put his fingers over Julian’s eyes, he would be able to feel them flicking around. He supposes this is okay because even if is Julian is bleeding in his brain or something, there is nothing else he can do for him now. And whatever pain Julian is experiencing now, it can’t be anything compared to what he felt when John washed the dirt from a gouge in his arm that went all the way through the fat to the muscle.

John had insisted on stitches, and Julian had gritted his teeth through the leather of his belt and held his own slowly bleeding arm shut until somehow, several minutes later, it stayed unevenly sealed when he released it. After that, John stuck to pouring water and letting Julian decide on bandages or doing- whatever the hell that pinch magic was.

Julian wasn’t giving any explanations and sometimes John knows when to not ask.

 

 

 

John wakes up with the worst kind of crick in his neck, and the smell of frying eggs. He sits up to try to rub the crick out and discovers that one and a half of his arms are asleep too, courtesy of the hard edge of the counter he’d passed out on sometime last night. This morning. Whenever. It hurts.

And Slink is moving around, albeit looking as stiff as John feels, making breakfast. He’s also not wearing his shirt or jacket- one destroyed, the other damaged and soaked in blood and bundled up on the stained sideboard- and consequently John gets an eyefull far before he’s really prepared for it.

“Shouldn’t you still be asleep?”

“Good morning.” Slink’s back has older scars on it and when he turns to face John, the new ones on his chest and arm become visible. They’re sunken in, webby with collagen. “I got hungry.”

John’s back pops audibly, multiple times, when he stretches. Julian snickers at him. “You should have at least slept out there.”

“You were dying.”

“Not after the fever kicks in.”

“Oh, well you could have told me, maybe around the time you were demanding that worship you and make sacrifice to your godhood.” John snips back at him.

“You could still worship me, you know.” Julian winks at him.

John stares at him. “Aaand I will be going back to sleep now, in my bed, far away from all this nonsense.”

“Stay for breakfast.” Julian suggests.

“Only if you explain why you aren’t dead.”

“Only if you get that stick out of your ass about us having sex.”

“I don’t-” John protests. “-we didn’t.”

Slink puts the third plate back on the stack of nominally clean dishes, the other two clearly being for himself. He’s made a  _lot_ of food. There’s even hash browns.

“-okay.” John finishes. “Plate me some of that.”

“I thought so.”

“Why don’t we go out there? Comfy chairs, you know.”

Slink passive aggressively leaves John’s plate on the table that’s been pulled up near the woodstove so that John has to get up and fetch it himself. He also seats himself on one of the counters, one plate beside him and the other in his lap.

“Frankly, this is need to know information. You-” Slink points with his fork. “don’t need to know, not anymore. And anyone out there doesn’t need to know either.”

“Aight.” John digs into the hash browns before they can consider going cold. “Tell me a tale.”

“A tale? You should know better than that.” Julian shovels more food into his mouth, just barely maintaining manners.

“Gimme the short version. I am still thinking fondly of being asleep in my actual bed.”

Slink  _hmphs_ like he’s offended by the concept of an abridged version of his backstory.

“Nuh-uh.” John heads him off before he can start. “ _Short_ version.”

“I am a clone.” Slink says, smug.

John waits for more.

Slink says nothing.

“First of all, fuck you. Secondly, that’s not anywhere near a complete explanation.”

Slink laughs at him. “You asked for the short version.”

“So I did. What’s the medium version?” John is gonna run out of food and Slink is  _not_ .

“I was experimenting in the 60s with a drug to induce controlled reincarnation. The last version I created killed me. Heart put my body on ice. Sometime in the 80s, some fools dug up my research and tried to make a hivemind consciousness- and bring me back to help them.” Slink winks at him. “When the Scar opened, the experiments finally succeeded. I lived again, sans most of my memories and bound to clones of my original body. My reincarnation _worked_.”

Slink grins at him. It’s an evil, wicked, proud thing. “My experiment was marked a failure because I wouldn’t _obey_ like my hivemind sister but it seems Heart forgot that we were mutually parasitic before I died the first time. They needed me more than I needed them, and now I don’t need them.”

“That doesn’t explain why you aren’t dead right now.” John says. He starts in on the last of his food. 

“Some interaction between the cloning process and my reincarnation drug makes me heal extremely quickly. It’s as if my cells are attempting to reincarnate but that doesn’t explain the scarring or the fevers.” Julian grimaces. “I’d do a study on it but I lost the _doctor_ part of ‘mad doctor’ while I was on ice and the fools are too incompetent and dead to actually figure out what I am.”

John is done with his food and uncomfortable about it. “So why did you need my help?”

“Getting gangrene sucks.” Julian is now onto his second plate. “Hurts like hell and ruins my clothing.”

“Really. I can’t imagine.” John can’t wait for Julian to say something that doesn’t make everything weirder, but the food and the exhaustion are pulling him down again. He wanted the- has it really only been a couple of days?- to be over with, but not like this if he’s being honest with himself.

He says, “I’m sorry. For being a dick to you.”

Julian, mouth absolutely stuffed with potato, says, “You’re welcome.”

“Why are you such a jerk all the time?” John doesn’t even try to not sound frustrated.

“It’s so much fun cracking you out of your comfort zone. And the sex isn’t bad either.”

“…isn’t bad. Wow, glowing reviews in here this morning. So glad I saved your life.”

“Thanks.” Julian says, less flippantly than he could have.

“How do you know Rasher’s okay with this?” They’d danced around the subject before, but John wants to do this, even if it fucks him up. Even if it’s temporary, oh god, even if it’s just another fucked up dream.

It’s the end of the world, he can do whatever he wants. If he can figure out what that is.

Julian winks at him. “We look so much alike that when I explain it to him, he’ll just about cream himself.”

“What.” John says, uncomprehending. “He’s-”

Slink tilts his head. “He hasn’t given up on the dream of me being able to inhabit two bodies and doubleteam him since he found out about my spares.”

“Spares- for when you die. Right.” John takes a steadying breath. “Why are you so fucking weird?"

Julian spreads his hands. “By your world’s standards, not by mine.”

“So that’s really gonna make it okay.” John doesn’t really believe it, like some kind of fucked up fantasy excuses the intimacy of breakfasts in the morning. Slink makes it sound so simple, like all of John’s agonizing wasn’t  _necessary_ .

“What about it don’t you get?” Slink sounds weirdly, genuinely curious.

John stares at his hands. “Why is he so loyal when you just-”

“Fuck other people? It’s what we  _do_.”

“Christ.” John says, inexplicably thinking of Tom for a split second. “Okay.”

He watches Slink has finish his food and start poking at his hollow scars with a curious expression. There’s something wrong here.

“You’re lying.”

Slink looks at him sharply.

“You don’t fuck other people. Neither of you do.” The food settles heavy in his stomach. “I’m the exception.”

Slink stares at him before speaking in the voice of a carnival barker telling him he’s just won a really big prize bear. “Congratulations! You’re the exception!”

The little voice in John’s head that sounds an awful lot like Laura reminds him of what he  _did_ and what he  _deserves_ and he supposes it’s right.

“He knows me well enough to understand this.” Slink spreads his hands. “I only with he was here to help me take advantage of the … situation.”

He’d not given a damn before, taking women from their men because he’d felt like it. How is this different, only he’s special and Julian’ll leave and he’ll never have to face the angry boyfriend. Fine.

If Julian can pretend, he can too.

“Well.” John says, standing up. “I’m going back to bed and staying there until something else goes catastrophically wrong.” 

Julian quirks an eyebrow at him.

“Join me?”

 

 

Julian lets him hold onto the frayed end of his masculinity and be the big spoon, although he’s pretty sure it’s just that he doesn’t want John’s hair in his face. He’ll take what he can get, and what he can  _get_ is sleeping with someone in his arms-

-and being able to pretend, however tenuously that things are okay and normal and it makes him sick in his belly as if he ever had a home to go back to-

-someone is pounding on the door. Lyle, shouting for him.

John startles awake; feels Julian sit up beside him, groggy and stiff.

“Aw fuck no.” John readjusts so he can be loud. “Fuck off Lyle!”

“There’s shelling on the south side of town an-” Lyle opens the door and whatever else he was gonna say dies in his mouth. “Uh.”

Julian recovers first. He says, in John’s voice. “Thought I told you to fuck off?”

“Boss, what the hell is-”

“You said shelling? Who’s?” John cuts him off, acutely aware that this looks exactly like what it is; him in bed, shirtless, with a guy who might as well be his twin, who is also shirtless.

“Uh.” Lyle is staring. He’s gonna catch words for this later. “We think it’s a group of humans working with the Espheni.”

“God bless the eternal human spirit.” John says sarcastically. “Get the hell out of my room. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Lyle backs out, shutting the door as he goes.

“Well.” John says, and then doesn’t know what else to say.

Julian kisses him.

“Oh.” John says. “I gotta.”

“Can I borrow a shirt?”

“Uh.” John’s got about two shirts. It’s a high fashion apocalypse. “Sure. Wait. Shouldn’t you be resting?”

Julian shrugs. “Probably. But being bored is worse.”

John finds that pretty relatable. “Thanks for breakfast.”

Julian looks like he’s about to say something, but instead he manages to just barely not turn his nose up at John’s spare shirt.

John almost asks. Almost.

 

 

By the time they get downstairs, it’s been well more than a minute and Julian is wearing John’s super uncool emergency backup jacket too and John has had a mulitfaceted crisis about how good Julian look in it and also how are the circus freaks shoulders just slightly broader than his? Unfair.

And Lyle is looking at him like  _really_ ?

“I don’t want your opinion.” John tells him, anxious to skip past the part where Lyle reminds him of how stupid all of his personal decision are. “What’s going on out there?”

“We don’t know much yet- shelling started about fifteen minutes ago. Blue light on impact, so it’s alien but if it was  _alien_ alien, we’d all be dead.”

“So someone’s taking ranging shots.” John mutters. “Scouting party?”

“Took the liberty of sending them out a couple minutes ago since you were.” Lyle coughs. “You heading out?”

“What’s the military doing?” He’s gotta keep tabs on all the players. No sense getting caught in the middle of an aerial bombardment. 

“Panicking.” Lyle rolls his eyes. “Something about saving the large munitions for an ‘actual emergency’.”

“I live here, so they better step it up.” John snorts. “Get 10 or 15 together who wanna be on a stealthy raiding party and wait for me to get back. And keep an eye on the military.”

“Aye aye.” Lyle gives him a lazy salute.

“C’mon.” John waves over his shoulder at Julian. “If you ain’t gonna rest, you better keep up.”

Julian grins at him, following him out the back of the Nest. At some point while he was talking to Lyle, Julian had found his sword again. Three blocks sideways, John stops and uncovers a motorcycle. It’s a big fat panhead but when John kicks it to life, it’s been tuned to the low mutter of a touring bike. It sounds a bit strangled until the idle settles.

“Didn’t think I was walking all the way to the south end, did you?”

Julian full on sniffs the motorbike, wrinkling his nose. “I forgot what gasoline smells like.”

 

 

Turns out a couple of smartasses figured out how to get the guns out of a downed Espheni gunboat and rig them as mortars. Tried to put the fear of god into the town to get leverage for supplies. John’s scout team marched them in like a gift to the military, and then he sent around a crew with a truck to collect their guns for his own profit.

John had managed to not be alone with Lyle until, damnit. “He’s not one of us, John.”

“Maybe that’s why, Lyle.”

“What if he’s in league with-” Lyle pauses delicately.

“If he is, he’s killing an awful lot of them.”

Lyle is unconvinced by this.

“Just don’t go barging in my room, yeah?”

“Good by me.”

They give each other hard looks and then John retreats.

 

 

 

 

John can’t find Julian anywhere and then it’s success by accident when he goes to his rooms and finds him there, asleep.

Well, that’s an idea.

But he’s stuck- can he just cuddle up? It’s his bed and Julian invited himself into it but isn’t it rude-

It’s John’s bed, damnit, so he lies in it.

 

 

John wakes up into disconcerting and confusing feelings of his wife’s hands on his body and then he wakes up a second time to Julian’s hands on him which is disconcerting but far less confusing because his wife is years gone but Julian is right now.

He catches Julian’s hand where it’s exploring his chest, wrapping his fingers over and around Julian’s. “Hey, wha-?”

“Hello.” Julian murmurs. And then he presses his teeth to John’s shoulder, hardly enough to be a bite.It slides John into his body, sensation pouring through him and he is suddenly aware that he’s aroused and at the same instant overwhelmed by it.

He groans and clutches Julian’s arm to his chest.

Julian laughs, low and soft, and does it again.

John stiffens, before (mostly) melting back against him. “ _Oh_.”

Julian works his hand free of John’s and returns to exploring his chest. Not specifically to titillate, although he certainly spends enough time on John’s pecs, but as if he’s trying to feel every difference between them.

John basks in the attention for a while before capturing Julian’s hand again. He slowly slides their hands down to the waistband of his sweatpants. Julian slips his hand out from under John’s and right into his sweatpants.

And then immediately goes back to his casual exploration of John’s body.

He’s acting like it’s a mystery to him, instead of nearly identical. John finds it funny, maybe a little ticklish, oddly soothing.

He can feel how aroused he is, separate from the way Julian is touching him but also inextricably linked to the curious touch. This soft and extremely warm feeling lasts right up until Julian runs a finger along the firm length of his cock and around the head.

John moans softly, drawn out.

Julian bites him properly.

The spell is broken and John can twist until he can press a hard kiss to Julian’s lips.

Julian bites back before he can break away.

“What was that?”

“I’d always wondered what my cock would be like and-” Julian slowly wraps his fingers around the cock in question and John exhales through his teeth- “This is nice. I _like_ this.”

“Uh. Thanks. I think?” John doesn’t know how to feel about that assessment. Flattered, defensive, unwilling to dig any deeper, maybe.

“You gonna jerk me off or just keep feeling it?”

Julian snickers. “C’mon, on your back.”

John rolls, shoves down his sweats. Julian fumbles out of his own underwear before straddling John’s hips with the point of his pelvis jammed up against the base of John’s cock.

John looks up, scanning from where his cock points up between them to Julian’s downright predatory grin and frankly he has no idea what’s going on and that only gets a side of mild dread when Julian grips his dick and says  _mine now_ .

John gets as far as protesting,  _I think it’s mine_ , based on the sound logic that his dick is attached to him and therefore it’s his and then Julian has wiped his hand up his- John doesn’t have a word for it and then spit in his hand and is now jerking him hard and fast so  _really_ he stutters out a gasp and then goes momentarily completely rigid.

He manages to relax a little; head tipped back and chest pushed up like if he arches under Julian’s weight he’ll have room to breath.

He doesn’t - it doesn’t - Julian scrapes the nails of his free hand over the soft taut places under John’s ribs and then pushes him flat again. He opens his eyes- when had he closed them, surprised with himself- and Julian is looking at him with such intensity and concentration that it’s almost a snarl.

John feels something tighten up inside himself and clearly Julian does too because he slows his hand and John can actually see now how Julian’s weird grip on his cock lets him slide his fingertips and the back of his thumb on himself. And that can’t be fantastic but Julian’s rocking slightly against the base of his cock like John fucks into his hand. It’s fucking hysterical to John that even with different equipment they do the same  _thing_ and he accidentally starts giggling about it.

Julian growls at him to  _keep his eyes shut_ and when he doesn’t-

“Will you come if I tell you to?”

John doesn’t know and his shrug is met with scorn and Julian’s hand twisting just around the head and shit, he’s good at this-

“-maybe!” John gasps out.

And Julian’s wicked smile widens. “Ready?”

John pants  _yes_.

"Come for me.  _Now_ -”

And John is split with the fear that he  _won’t_ and Julian hits him, just barely stinging, just between his hips and it startles him right into his orgasm. Yanks him right out of the pit of fear that he won’t be able perform and flings him to the climax of success and he’s hazily unsure if Julian came but he’s leaning over John, all his weight hanging on one arm and the other hand pressed flat over his stain and panting.

“Holy shit.” John says.

Julian is grinning the smug grin of an animated cat with opposable thumbs and an entire room of things to destroy and John can’t shake the feeling that Julian just came all over him even though it’s his cum that’s pooling right over the cross tattooed in the middle of his chest.

Julian wipes a hand over the cross, holds it up. Cum slides between his fingers and he looks at it curiously and then he licks his hand clean.

They exist for another moment, Julian resting on John before Julian flops over beside him and they lie there like that until John decides he wants to be cuddly.


	6. Chapter 6

He wakes up from the dream where the grey sky blends into the grey road and he has to walk and walk and walk and he’s done so much walking since the end of the world that when he wakes up in his bed in his grubby little room full of thin grey morning light with Julian in his arms and the little voice under his tongue telling him that he’s in too deep, he kisses the back of Julian’s neck.

He does it again because he can.

Julian stirs a little, uncurling and stretching back against John.

“Mornin’.”

Julian makes a crackly sound.

This is what John had been afraid of, to be peaceful in the morning. Of trying despite the time limit that will come down on him without any warning at all. To know the joy and the fear again.

Julian rolls over to kiss him on the lips and they’ve both got terrible morning breath so it doesn’t matter at all, does it. “So early-”

“We’re slaves to the daylight now-” John murmurs. And then his stomach gurgles and Julian blinks at him and giggles.

 

 

 

Breakfast is a tumultuous affair with Julian invading his space as he cooks for the both of them, just being all over helpful until he makes Julian sit  _over there_ on the counter.

Which, he discovers, gives him the space to talk about things. “You haven’t blown me yet-”

Julian looks at him, bright. “Mm?”

“When I said we could go straight to the blowjobs, I meant for you to blow me.”

“Oh, I know.” Julian says, insufferably knowing. “I wasn’t giving you that kind of power trip that early. You straight people have all kinds of nonsense bound up in relative positions and I wanted to break you of that first.”

What is he going on about. Why is Julian like this.

“Are you broken of it yet?” Julian asks, snide.

“I- didn’t know that I had. Relative positions.” John mutters as he plates the food. “Look, maybe I just want to stick my dick in your mouth. Is that too much to ask?”

Julian accepts the plate. “As long as you describe to me in _excruciating_ detail what it’s like seeing your lips stretched around a dick is like while I jerk off after.”

“You drive a hard bargain. It’s a deal.”

They eat in companionable silence but when John takes the plates to wash up, Julian invades his space again.

“Listen, I gotta-” John twists in Julian’s arms. “Just cause I mentioned it doesn’t mean-.”

“You sure about that?” Julian asks from over his shoulder, voice soft and husky.

And no, he’s not sure about it at all, but he needs to see a warehouse about some grain cause he’s got a theory.

 

 

The view from on top of the grain silos is something incredible. The sky persists in hanging low, fading into the ocean at the horizon in one direction and the trees in the other. The devastation in the city is- it would be heartbreaking if it didn’t make him a king.

Julian had come with him, claiming boredom with sticking around the settlement. Which is good in John’s book; he likes having someone protecting his back. Who knows what they’ll find this far away from the settlement.

The first silo is a bust, opened ages ago at the bottom and the grain spilled among the pylons is rotting and growing in equal measure.

The second has water in it: opening the access hatch in the top throws a blast of rotten fermented air directly into his face which just about puts him on his ass.

Julian gets back at him for mocking his motorcycle helmet hair by laughing at him for this.

The third one is a third full and in perfect condition as far as he can tell. Means they’ve got years worth of grain if John can find a way to mill it to flour before he has to start looking further afield.

And this means he can take the rest of the day off. He goes to the cityward side of the silos where Julian is doing a pretty good mountain goat impression on the superstructure of girders. It’s rather intimidating- Julian seems certain that he won’t make a mistake when jumping from one strut to the next, that his boots won’t slip, that he won’t fall. John watches him a while before looking down over the edge of the silo. 

It’s dizzying. John puts the toes of his boots right at the edge of the walkway grating and thinks about the hundred plus feet between him and the tired asphalt below. It’s almost nothing in horizontal distance, but in vertical? He exhales slowly and steps back so he can lean  _on_ the railing instead of over it.

He can see most of his spare safehouses from here. And if he changes their route back to The Nest just a little bit, they can stop by one of them.

Julian lands beside him with a clang of bootheels on expanded steel grating. “Find what you were looking for?”

John is pretty sure he doesn’t mean the grain but as he’s equally sure that Julian isn’t actually telepathic, he just says, “Sure. It’s beautiful without all the people, isn’t it?”

Julian gives him a near-wistful look. “Cities need people. Other wise they-” He makes a crumbling gesture.

 

 

John takes the altered route that he’d laid out in his mind, but somehow Julian manages to pick his safehouse out of a block of identical boarded up rowhouses anyway.

“How did you know this was here?”

“You’re not nearly as clever as you think.” Julian smirks at him.

“Neither are you.” John opens the door to the ‘abandoned’ rowhouse. Julian follows him in.

It’s an auxiliary safehouse. John had picked it for its strong roof and protected location in the center of a row of houses- it’ll stand approximately forever if it doesn’t burn. The inside is nearly untouched from the previous owners: pictures of relatives wait on shelves, the houseplants are dead, and it’s very dim because John had boarded the windows to protect it from hurricanes. “Welcome home, honey.”

Julian flounces at him. “Sweetie, it’s so cute. Did you decorate it yourself?”

“Just for you, baby.” It’s very late nineties; pastels and florals both in strong evidence. The world hadn’t lasted much after that, so it’s not terribly surprising that it never got updated. John hates it and it’s pretty clear that Julian hates it too. “Come upstairs, let me show you around.”

Julian clatters up the stairs ahead of him, pacing it just right to wiggle his butt in John’s face.

And he knows they’re just playing in the ruins, but something in his chest aches at the casual normalcy of this, something that doesn’t exist anymore. So he grabs Julian’s ass and trips him up the last couple of steps and against the landing wall. Which, thank fuck, hasn’t gone soft, and then he’s kissing Julian way harder than he meant to.

Julian is acting coy about it, hands curled in the open front of John’s Henley but not pulling. “Aw, honey, can’t you wait until we get to the bedroom?”

“You’re too cute for that. Spent the whole morning getting me hot and bothered and  _now_ you want to slow down? Baby…” John growls softly, leaning his whole weight against Julian, squishing him.

Julian whines.

“Aw, you’re so sweet like this. Makes me wanna stick it to ya all the time.” John murmurs and he’s praying Julian isn’t laughing because inside the fear and the confusion and the rust on his tongue- it’s more than that base desire.

“Sweetie, show me the bedroom and I’ll make it good for you.” Julian suggests with all the confidence of a man who knows that no raccoons have moved in since the last time the safehouse was inspected.

John wishes he had that kind of confidence about any of the things he’s doing right now.

“Baby,” He says, nosing right up under Julian’s ear, “Better hurry up or I’m gonna turn you around and do you right here.”

Julian giggles, pressing his hands flat to John’s chest. “Nuh-uh.”

John laughs with him, grabs one of his hands and pulls him up the last couple of steps to the door of the bedroom.

As incongruous as it is to the game they’re playing, Julian lets him survey the room for a moment and thankfully it looks untouched, if only a lot dusty. He tugs Julian in after him. “Darling, do you like it?”

The room is, frankly, ugly as hell and he can see the pain in Julian’s eyes as he says. “It’s _inspiring_.”

John spins Julian around and Julian makes it graceful right into the backwards fall onto the bed and his trust is rewarded with a puff of dust and no spiders at all. Julian lands on top of him, nose to nose, one foot kicked up.

John grins. “Aw, you don’t gotta lie to me like that.”

Julian bites the tip of his nose, making him yelp. "I'll lie if I want to!"

Julian shoves his face under John’s chin, forcing his head back until Julian can kiss his throat where his beard ends, down his throat to the divot where his collarbones meet. Julian’s got him  _gasping_ in a minute. 

“Baby-”

Julian makes an insufferably smug sound against his chest and John pets his hair, the soft stubbly back of his head, his shoulders as Julian kisses his way down into the V of John’s shirt.

Julian rucks John’s shirt up and kisses the soft place between his ribs. It makes John squirm and as much as he was playing the larger man out in the hall, he’s got no control here, not with Julian between his legs and his hands on John’s hips and the wicked look on his face.

John tucks one arm back under his head as a pillow; he wants to  _watch_ . And Julian immediately goes back to being coy, kissing just above John’s belt like everything below is a mystery.

“ _Fuck_ , darling.”

“Yes, honey?” And Julian is so sweet he’s nauseating.

John pushes Julian’s head down just a little further.

Julian makes the most scandalized of sounds.

John lifts his hips against Julian’s face pressing just slightly and Julian opens his mouth around the bulge in John’s jeans and John drops back down with a whine. “Come _on_.”

He’d cracked first, losing whatever game they'd been playing with the pet names and the posturing. He embraces defeat by getting his dick out and poking Julian in the face with it which earns him a bite to the high inside of his thigh.

“ _ow_ .”

But just as quickly, Julian closes his lips around his dick making John choke on a moan in surprise. Julian’s self satisfied hum is as much a feeling as a sound. He doesn’t know what to do with all this so he grasps uselessly at Julian’s hair and makes needy sounds.

Julian sucks his dick all the way down and he can barely hold the feeling and sight at the same time, like it can’t be real until he touches the corner of Julian’s mouth where it’s stretched thin around his dick and “ _oh_ _god, Julian_.”

Julian teases him with licks around the head, hand pressed flat against him around the root. Overwhelms him by taking him all the way into his throat and swallowing.

John is incoherent, arm over his face like it will help him feel more clearly. Julian even lets him fuck a little, pulling off just enough to let him roll his hips before swallowing him back down and it’s so long and not long enough before he’s gasping that he’s gonna cum and Julian’s saying  _yes_ and swallowing it down and he’s about to die from how much it feels.

He’s next aware that Julian is half lying on him, urgently rocking his hips against his thigh and the point of his pelvis is crushingly sharp but he feels too good to care and is loosely clinging to Julian anyway.

“Hey.” John says softly. “Hey. C’mup here.”

Julian obliges him, squiggling up far enough to kiss him. He’s got that edge of hunger, demanding more.

“Lemme get you off.”

And instantly Julian is rolling to the side, stripping off his trousers and rolling back over John to straddle his face. Julian’s already wet, of course he is.

He’s doing his best to make like Julian did for him, but Julian doesn’t seem to care about finesse in favor of rutting on his face which John is  _fine_ with until his jaw aches and he-

gets his thumbs hooked under Julian, practically on his perineum with his fingers spread around Julian’s stain, making a little diamond. Makes something for Julian to thrust into, lets him lick and suck as he wants and Julian seems real pleased with this from his sounds and the way he’s curling over John. And then he remembers the way Julian likes it when they’re rubbing down on each other so he digs his thumbs in under Julian’s thrusts and then in a minute scrapes his teeth where he’s less sensitive and then twice more and Julian is coming into his mouth, hot and slicker.

John’s got that self satisfied sort of pride that he  _did that_ as Julian moans and curls over him. John lets him come back to himself for a moment before pulling Julian down to lay against him.

Then they doze like that until Julian gets restless and they head out under the reddening sky and back to town.


	7. Chapter 7

They’re eating lunch- John had spent the day trying to source a place to store the grain local to the settlement, or even mill it, but all those places are on the industrial edge of old Charleston according to the phone book he’s using as an address book and he’s mad about it- when Julian eyes him more than usual and says, “So you want to stick it to me.”

“Sure.” John agrees, certain he’s gonna like where this is going.

“Have you ever fucked someone in the ass before?”

“Not as such, but I’ve-” John suggestively wiggles a finger.

“Wanna learn?”

“Only if I get to fuck you!” John quips.

“Just for assuming it’ll be you fucking me, I’ll find a dick to fuck you with.” Julian smirks. “Pass that phone book.”

John drops it in his lap with a thump.

“I hop worlds and I’m s _till_ going over outdated maps.” Julian mutters. “The shit I do for a good time.”

John kicks Julian’s leg, but gently.

 

 

At Julian’s behest, they make a detour on the their trip to the library. The mission is for information about mill stones since John is pretty sure they won’t be able to spin up any of the industrial machinery but water power is more viable than ever and there’s an old mill to the south, some historic site or whatever.

Julian’s side stop is a little shop that was probably once seedy but is now as organically inclined as the rest of the ramshackle row of abandoned liquor stores and nail salons. 

John pauses, though, helmet in hand, looking at the dead neon of the adult video sign. “There’s gonna be some horror movie bullshit in there. Women with three heads and six tits or like, ram’s heads.”

Julian looks over his shoulder from where he’s picking the lock. “Baby, I _am_ a horror movie, and you’re lying if you tell me you wouldn’t fuck them.”

John shakes his head, bemused.

Julian picks the lock with mind boggling speed, ushering John into the darkened shop almost before he’s secured the motorcycle from the possibility of passers by.

John’s not sure what he was expecting but after his eyes adjust to the dark inside the store, it’s not that. The front part is filled with racks of clothing, lingerie probably, and manikins showing off the goods. The back is still too dark for him to see into.

The windows are papered- brown paper on the outside, sun faded, and posters of scantily clad ladies on the inside. Most of the light comes from the narrow beam let in by the door, propped open with a rock that Julian nudged into place.

John wanders through the front section. It’s eerily untouched, like the shopkeepers locked up with the intention of returning the next day. Cards and samples and condom packets litter the counter but the manikins are shabby with age decayed elastics and dust.

Julian has headed straight back to the darker room. John follows slowly, winding his way through ghostly fishnetted legs.

The back room is a couple of rows of low shelves and a glass counter on one side. The walls are lined with cases of videotapes.

He realizes what’s on the low shelves when he spots Julian over by a shelf topped by a set disembodied manikin hips each with a harness and strapon and anticipation rips through him like a wave.

It’s not like he hadn’t thought about it before- one of his girls had suggested it but sometimes things just don’t come to pass- he’s put a finger up his own ass more than once. But this is- Julian’s promised to deliver sensation directly to his hindbrain and cut his ego right out of the loop.

He wanders among the shelves, contemplating the merchandise as he heads for Julian. There’s something to be said for them being the exact same height because he can tuck his chin right over Julian’s shoulder and wrap his arms around him and snoop on whatever Julian’s looking at, which is two clear fronted boxes, each with a plastic dick inside.

John kisses the side of Julian’s neck, which Julian completely ignores.

“Which one?”

John contemplates the choices, eventually picking the red one. It’s a little slimmer, a little sleeker.

Julian laughs at him because they both know that he picked the one that would be less of a challenge. He graciously accepts his ridicule by licking the back of Julian’s ear.

 

 

The day’s looting had been highly successful, if also one of the strangest single collections of things he’s ever stolen. He’s been skimming the books in the last of the daylight as the bar moves and lives around him. He needs information  _now_ so his brain can chew on it while he’s asleep, and night is coming soon to take the light.

And then he realizes that it’s too dark for him to be reading any more, and that Julian has disappeared. On a hunch, he gathers up the books and heads up to his quarters. The door is locked, as it should be, but it’s hardly a surprise to find his lover inside. Locks don’t seem to slow him down none.

John doesn’t drop his books when he sees Julian. He’s  _not_ an animal although he feels like he’s about to be, so he places the books aside with the respect they should be accorded.

Julian side eyes him, the slightest of smirks on on his face.

John knows that Julian staged this, everything from the steady lantern light and the flickering candles to the exact alignment of his posture against the light. His shoulders held broad, hips pushed forward to  _display_ the way the strapon juts forward and the way the harness augments the shape of his ass. The way the flickering light makes his body crawl with shadows and scars like vines.

Julian is fucking gorgeous and while John doesn’t know shit about art, he knows how to appreciate a fine body. So he takes a moment to just  _look_ before he whistles long and low.

Julian’s smirk grows.

John has to look with his hands now; he crosses the small room with quick strides. Julian turns to meet him and then they’re pressing their bodies together.

Julian’s dick pushes up against him, disconcertingly inflexible. His mind doesn’t recognize the feeling until he slides his hand down Julian’s body to adjust the way they’re pressing together and his hand brushes Julian’s stain and he’s slick and Julian moans. And then John knows exactly what he wants.

He leaves one hand on Julian’s hip. Slides the other one around the back of Julian’s head and draws him into a kiss.

Julian nips him.

He honestly doesn’t know what he expected.

He tilts Julian’s head to the side, gaining access to the delicate spot under the corner of his jaw- at least one of them keeps it shaved- he nips. Not hard, but enough to make Julian squeak and clutch at him.

He can feel the thrill travel through him, Julian pressing against him like he’s never restrained an impulse in his life. John backs him up against the dresser.

John nips him again, then slowly follows Julian’s pulse down to his bare collarbones. By the time he’s got his teeth around one bone, Julian’s got one hand in his hair and is holding his head against his chest.  _Demanding_.

John  _gives_ until the crik in his shoulders insists otherwise. He folds down to his knees, stretches to pop his spine and neck.

When he leans in again, Julian slides his dick over John’s cheek. It’s cool and firm and in stark contrast to the wet heat radiating off of Julian as he kisses the soft skin between his hip bone and the straps of the harness. Julian is making soft sounds above him, so he keeps kissing and licking among the straps, pushing Julian’s dick aside with his face to gain access to the stain he knows so well.

But he can’t, not really- Julian’s dick is in the way, demanding attention. He spreads his tongue and licks at the base and the silicon warms for him.

Julian lets out a harsh groan and John reflexively glances up at him. And Julian is looking down at him like he’s prey. It’s too much, so he looks away, busies himself.

Julian commands him, casually, voice so low it’s barely words, “Touch your cock for me.”

John has one hand on Julian’s hip and he can’t bear to let go so he undoes his belt and jeans with one hand, desperately strokes his cock out of his jeans.

“ _Good_ .”

Julian pulls his head in, presses the head of his cock to John’s lips and John lets him in like it’s natural. It slides slick and smooth between his lips, open his jaws up a bit more than is really comfortable, there’s rushing in his ears. And then it’s in the back of his mouth and Julian’s making that harsh aroused sound again. It’s really hot and he’s really hard and he’s-

He works his tongue. Tries bobbing his head a little; can’t push in but can pull off. Can’t quite figure out how to open the back of his mouth to take more and he  _wants_ to. He pushes anyway

can’t do it

pulls off and leans his head against Julian’s hip. Panting and trying not to drool until Julian grabs his hair and moves him back.

He tries again, takes more, feels a flush of pride and spite when Julian groans  _you look so fucking good like-_

but can’t finish his words. Julian leans harder on the dresser, one hand pressed flat on the surface among all the junk. The other hand grips John’s head, flexing in his hair as John applies himself. He’s getting the hang of this, he thinks, enough to wonder what it’s gonna be like when Julian fucks him. If his body will adjust like it’s doing now. The thought makes him both queasy and excited.

_ah fuck_

John swallows, he feels lightheaded, suddenly Julian is moving his head. Not by much and John resists momentarily to steady himself and then lets it happen. He can’t quite parse it as the same kind of  _hot_ as eating Julian out, but he’s so fucking into the sounds Julian’s making, that his stain is nearly dripping, how thick his cock is in his hand-

He coughs. Julian lets him go for a moment to catch his breath before sliding in again and John sucks him down. And,  _fuck,_ he wants to come.

Pats Julian’s hip to get his attention and Julian may as well have read him mind because he gets  _don’t come_ in response and he wants to snarl but there’s a dick in his mouth and he  _can’t_

He freezes.

Julian thrusts into his mouth, too hard, John chokes and Julian holds him for a long moment with a deep groan. Releases him almost immediately.

John sucks air in a huge gasp, flooding himself and falls right over the edge, come spattering the floor between his knees and Julian’s bare feet.

“Holy shit.”

Julian snickers, petting his face. “You did so good.”

John rocks back onto his heels, meaning to stand before abandoning the idea in favor of staying on the floor and not whiting out when he stands. “Good to know someone around here appreciates my skills.”

He wipes his lips on the back of his hand. Disgusting. They feel tender and swollen. He needs some water.  _Fuck_ . He did that.

“Let’s get cleaned up.”


	8. Chapter 8

The morning sun comes too early, cracking him out of bed despite his soreness. Seems like he’s too old to be on his knees like that. Well, it should be an easy day- just a ride out to the historic site to survey it and then a lazy afternoon with Julian and then his bar shift.

He finishes washing his face, thinking back to the debauchery with anticipation. A lazy afternoon, sure.

 

 

The ride out to the historic mill site is pleasant if circuitous. It’s on the other side of the bridge and the bridge is out, and so’s the next one upstream. The signs of obvious flooding have John a little nervous, but with Julian clinging to his back is a welcome distraction.

The mill site is not what he hoped for, that much is immediately apparent. There’s a downed tree slowly integrating itself into the visitor’s center and while John doesn’t care about the visitor’s center, it doesn’t bode well for the other structures on the lot.

He guides the motorcycle down the overgrown sidewalk and around to the back of the building. He stops the bike as soon as it’s out of sight from the road which is really an overabundance of caution but he likes this one and intends to keep it. Julian dismounts immediately and he follows a moment later, hanging his helmet up on the handlebar and shaking his hair out.

“Hoooly shit.” He says.

Julian sniffs.

The mill house is standing, but the siding has been torn off and distributed about the yard. Outbuildings are leaning or flattened. Thistles and teasels are growing up high and enthusiastically through the debris.

“The roof is on.” John remarks, starting a mental triage. “Let’s take a look.”

The door might have been locked but John steps right through a gap in the wall. Inside is dim and full of dried leaves and Julian immediately ranges off on his own. John assumes that he can take care of himself in structurally unsound buildings and heads off in the other direction to follow the remains of the information placards hung up on the walls.

It’s some sort of tour leading him through the history and construction of the mill, and some of this is gonna be really useful to him. There’s even some blown up prints of the old mill mechanism and one of them even implies that it was restored to operation.

He doesn’t want to hope, but goddamn.

The mechanism  _was_ behind plexiglass. The plexi is now blown aside, leaning precariously into the walkway alongside the gears and feed troughs. Signs indicate where grain would have come in and flour out and where the mill stones would go, but those have been truncated to seal the building, and the mechanism is still. But overall it looks in as good condition as anything that had survived its own obsolescence and the alien apocalypse could.

Julian clatters up beside him. “The grain inlet is cut off too.”

“Do you think this should be moving? The placards-”

Julian nods, already squeezing between the fallen plexiglass panels to get into the mechanism. John worms his way in after him, targeting the access door on the far side.

The door is locked from the outside, although there are the now-visible marks of a long-missing latch on the inside.  _Damn_.

Forced to circle around from outside, the reason why the mechanism is motionless is immediately obvious- the water wheel is downstream, thrown off its storage hooks, with a tree speared through it.

“Aw,  _fuck_.”

Julian pats his back. It feels a little condescending since  _Julian_ probably won’t be the one dealing with this mess.

“I was hoping for an easy six weeks but this is, hell, probably a year.” John starts tallying items on his fingers. ”Walls, water wheel, grain in and out- if there are even grind stones to copy-. Gonna need lumber and _that_ will take time too.”

John paces up the stonework, looking up and down the channel. The water runs higher now than it used to, perks of all this low sky and rain, which has swept clearer than it would have perhaps otherwise been. It’s still gonna be a big project.

Julian calls after him, “-wanna go look at the industrial operations?”

John does not want to look at the industrial operations. John wants to be not responsible, but Mason’s gotten in on the project too so now he’s gotta.

 

 

“Let you in on a little secret, Julian! I don’t have the fuel to start those machines!”

Julian snorts. “People are cheap!”

“People are expensive. You gotta feed them.” John rubs the back of his neck, catches Julian looking, rolls his eyes.

Julian smirks.

“Let’s go.”

 

So much for his lazy afternoon.

The industrial buildings are always the worst. Full of water dripping from the shitty flat roofs and broken windows. Bad smells. Birds that got in and didn’t make it out again. Skitters.

Not skitters anymore, not usually. John’s blown enough of them up on day trips to generally deter them from roosting under nearby overpasses and in buildings.

Julian looks more at home here than he did in the sun and the weeds at the mill house.

“Solar panels, do you think?”

Julian shrugs. “There’s enclaves in the southwest and northeast with them, but they probably don’t exist here.”

“Too much rain, maybe.” John heads for the bus panel. “Oh, _triphase_. Fuck.”

He kicks an errant can and it rattles off into the distance for an irritatingly long time.

“It’s getting dark.” Julian observes neutrally.

“Right.” A bar shift is exactly what John needs. Normal shit that he knows how to do.

 

 

 

John is on the far side of the Nest, doing his bar tending thing. Lyle and Trish help out, but mostly they rotate days so nobody’s stuck on shift all the time and they’ve all got different specialties, so-. He’s tending the bar, and Julian is on the far side doing his scholar thing with his notebook and his fancy engraved pen and the books he just fucking stole from somewhere.

John is perhaps paying more attention to Julian than he really should be.

The first flick of alarm comes when he sees two of his gang sit on either side of Julian, friendly chat style. He’s too far away to do anything about it and Julian looks completely unconcerned by being surrounded, but he has also closed his notebook. Placed his pen on top of it. Resting his hands on top of that.

One of the men leans closer to Julian, and says something. John has laser focus on him, dulling out the rest of the bar sounds as he desperately tries to hear what’s being said. And when he hears it, he _does not_ like it. “You turning Pope faggot?”

Julian’s expression flickers from bored, to snarl, to  _savage_.

The other guy leans in, pushing his shoulder into Julian’s, trapping him against the table. Says something that John doesn’t catch. John puts down the glass he was wiping and moves in that direction.

Julian  _moves_ like a striking snake.

The fight is over by the time John has cleared the end of the bar.

Guy the second is on the floor howling, hands clutched around the shaft of the pen sticking out of his eye. The first guy never made it to his feet; he’s slumped sideways on the bench, the grip of the bayonet through his neck caught on the table edge and his weight twisting his body around it and holding the wound open as his body dumps blood out onto the floor.

Julian is standing over the guy with the pen in his eye, tac knife in hand. People are just beginning to react to the scene. There is some amount of horror as people realize exactly where the howling is coming from.

John skids to a halt. He needs to defuse, he needs to  _enforce the rules_. It is too fucking  _late_ to enforce the rules.

Julian says, spitefully, “Homophobes. They never learn.”

John realizes, belatedly, that Julian was protecting him. It’s about as disturbing as the pool of blood that has crept around Julian’s boots. He can’t say anything; his voice is not working.

Julian looks around at the rest of the bar. “Anyone else thinking that I’ve compromised John?”

Everyone kind of looks at the floor.

“ _Good_ .”

John looks down at the guy, who is still alive. He looks at Julian. One of the bar rules is that killing is not allowed inside. Julian knows this.

They simply don’t have the resources to save him.

“Take it outside, Julian.” He feels absolutely hollow, like the shallows before a tsunami. Full of slimy things and little crabs snipping around.

Julian looks at him, and then stamps the pen the rest of the way into the guy’s skull.

There’s a small chorus of horrified sounds. John may be one of them.

“It’s a pity.” Julian says. “Where do the bodies go?”

The matter of fact way that Julian just _asks_ _,_ like it’s normal to stash bodies somewhere floors John. “Shovel’s out back, graveyard’s three blocks over thataway.”

Julian looks delighted. “A graveyard! How quaint.”

“Enjoy it, because you’re digging two graves by yourself tonight.” John gives him a hard look. “I will deal with you when you come back. Git.”

Julian gets.

The entire bar is staring at John, and he wants to disappear for a while. But there’s blood on the floor and if he gives it half a chance it’ll soak right in and stain his floorboards something awful. So he hollers for Lyle until Lyle appears and takes over crowd management for him while he goes and puts his soul into those meaningless fucking floorboards.

And then he goes down to the graveyard.

 

 

 

The night is low and chill and empty. It clings to his face and in his lungs, but it does not make him cold. If anything, it throws the burn in his back and his throat and where one hand cradles his revolver inside his jacket into sharper focus.

He doesn’t know that shooting Julian would keep him down.

He doesn’t know that he could put Julian down.

He doesn’t think that Julian was wrong, exactly, but Julian is a free loading interloper who just spectacularly undermined John’s authority on his own territory. And  politically, he’s gonna have to do something dramatic and visible about that by tomorrow regardless of how he feels.

The graveyard is jammed into a city block, as old as the city itself. It’s been full for decades, no new graves until the new town established itself in the ruins and started burying bodies three feet down on the perpendicular and calling it good enough. It’s overgrown now; trees and vines vying for the thin light from the sky.

Julian must hear him somehow because he calls out to John as he approaches. “Have you come to kill me?”

John lets himself into the graveyard through a hole in the black iron fence. “I don’t know.”

“You should figure that out.” Julian suggests. He’s nearly invisible in the dark, disappearing when he’s motionless.

John envisions- a bullet through the heart or the skull should kill him in a permanent way.

“Why?” John asks. “You coulda just punched them down. Broke some noses and it would have been fine.”

“They would have festered. Poisoned your organization from the inside and gone after you eventually, even if they took me out.” Julian punctuates by accidentally jamming the shovel into a rock. “They were useless to you.”

“I know how to manage my empire, Julian.” John shifts. “And now I have to find some way of disciplining you that restores their faith in my authority.”

Julian shovels some dirt.

“I don’t have one.”

Julian shovels more dirt.

The silence stretches.

“I’d have broken their noses, put em out on the street for a couple of nights.” John shrugs, not that Julian can see it. “I can’t just break your nose and call it good.”

“Being as everyone knows we’re fucking.” John continues bitterly.

“I’d have to make you a pariah. Or kill you.”

Julian stabs the shovel into the dirt. “You aren’t going to.”

“Ayy-yup.” John says.

He might just be able to handle the universe taking Julian away like it’s supposed to, but he doesn’t want to lose him. He doesn’t want to be the one who makes it  happen . Not again. Not even with all this anger and fear burning under his skin.

Julian drags the second body into its grave. The thud just kind of hangs in the air between them.

“It’s your empire. What’s the plan?” Julian inquires.

“I break your face in front of all of them, and kick you out. You don’t be seen around The Nest anymore.”

“And at night, I sneak back in.”

“’Pending on how I feel about that, maybe I break your face again. See if I can make your nose stay crooked.” The threat feels empty as soon as it leaves his mouth. He’s got no power here; not over himself and not over Julian.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Julian gives John a panic attack in this chapter and because they're idiots, it's handled poorly.

John raps on the blackboard. The harsh sounds carry through the bar, quieting it. Usually the wagers are written up and John would be staging the betting but tonight the wagers are stored on the auxiliary board and the big one is wiped clean.

When it’s as quiet as it’s gonna get, he starts in on it. “There are a couple of rules in here. You all know them. No meddling in the wagers. Clean up after yourselves because we’re all in here together and the scrip don’t pay. _No murder_.”

A couple people snicker at that. Julian gives him an impassive look.

“There’s another rule that some of you seem to have forgotten. What happens between consenting adults is none of your business.”

There’s a couple of nods out in the crowd. He can’t tell if that’s support, or other people having problems that he doesn’t know about and he’s too frazzled to fish at it right now.

The bar has a betting system that John encourages. Wagers are set on current events and on who’s gonna fuck up and how. It keeps people in line because nobody really wants to see their name and a probability for their death up there. And it allows John to keeps tabs on the gossip and to seed the rumor mill. He makes the rules- no meddling in the wagers doesn’t apply to  _him_ . Today Trish has been keeping tabs on the gossip, and by god, men will tell a red headed woman  _anything_ . And nearly all of gossip is on what John’s gonna do about Julian.

“Abel and Keith attacked Slink for something that was none of their business, and meant to attack me.” John clicks his tongue reprovingly. “Some of you think I should kill him. The reasons are… fascinating. Which puts me in a bit of a dilemma.”

“I would call the jury to do as we usually do and collectively decide to hit him and tell him not to do it again, but I’m not feeling _particularly_ trusting of you lot right now so I’m gonna do it unilaterally.” He raises his voice. “Slink!”

Julian steps up on the low platform, calm and collected as anything.

John meets him halfway. John looks him in the eye and sees men he’s killed. John hits him in the face.

Julian falls over backwards, blood on his face, and John hopes to god that’s acting because-

someone in the crowd hoots and  _damn_ that bloodsport always sells-

he deviates from script and kicks Julian in the back.

Julian rolls face down and stops moving, but John can see breathing. Shallow and slow and even and the relief is barely a drop in pit of dread in him.

“Alright everyone, you may return to your evenings.”

Someone claps. He can’t see who, which is rather unfortunate as whoever it is should be monitored for future bullshit. He gives everyone another thirty seconds to mind their own business again before he gets Julian back on his feet.

Julian plays unsteady on his feet until they’re in the side hall and then he turns on John. He shoves John up against the wall, jams a leg between John’s. John gasps and fuck,  _fuck_ Julian’s so close and giving him some pretty scary crazy eyes.

But it’s Julian who speaks first, one hand cupping John’s chin. “You did so well out there. I haven’t had that kind of fun in far too long!”

John scrambles, wrong footed since Julian pushed him against the wall, trying to- “ _Fun?_ ”

“Oh,  _yeah_ .” Julian murmurs, voice pitched to a buzz. They’re pressed chest to chest, body heat trapped between them, burning him up.

“What the  _hell_ ?” John pushes him, startled and angry at the realization that Julian was getting off on that whole production while John was scared stiff his mob was gonna grow a spine and behead him. That even with Julian’s durability, he’d killed him, like he’d done before- a freak accident he’d done time for.

Julian rocks back, fluid and easy on his feet now that he’s not playing. “John, woah. Easy now _.”_

“Don’t fucking touch me.” John stumbles sideways out of Julian’s reach. “What the fuck is wrong with you.”

Julian has the decency to look shocked and confused. He also closes the gap between them, bloodied face far too close to John’s again. “You give me a taste of home and expect what- for me to pretend?”

John doesn’t hear him over the static rush in his head. He pushes Julian away again, hard enough to stagger him back across the hall and then runs for it.

“Hey!”

He flings himself up the stairs. Around the ornate balustrade that’s seen far better days, down the hall. Into his room.

Back when he’d picked this place to set up in, he’d selected these rooms specifically for himself because they locked  _and_ he could find the key for them. He locks the door and then slides down into a lump in the corner of the floor and the door.

Despite being further away from Julian, he doesn’t feel better. Only caved out on the inside, he’s suffocating in the fall of his hair across his face, to think he could have anything more than what he stole from the dirt itself.

He’s laughing, choking on air as his lungs betray him, oh god, he’s so fucking lost-

There’s pounding on the door. Bang bang bang. Gunfire. Julian’s voice- “John!”

He’s so cold, shivering, jacket clutched tight across his shoulders, face on the floorboards.

 

 

 

He wakes up, full of pain. He is far to goddamn old to be sleeping on the floor, shoulders tucked under and jammed into the corner. He aches like he lost a fight and hell, maybe he did.

He’d run away.

He’d run away, and Julian had come looking, and he’d stayed on the floor. Unable to move, unable to breath.

He stretches, slowly, through the ache. Straightens out his clothing, since he’s still wearing yesterday’s. Brushes his hair back.

Breakfast. And then come what may.

 

 

Julian beat him to the kitchen. He considers backing out and trying to sleep until Julian goes away forever, but he’s hungry and already inside the kitchen so he has to commit to pretending everything is normal.

“Good morning.” Julian offers.

“Mornin’.” John mutters. “How do you, a lab grown monstrosity, know how to use the wood stove when half the people here refuse to touch it out of fear?”

Julian shrugs. “I stole my sister’s memories once and she knew how. I _assume_ her memory is synthetic.”

“Synthetic memory.” John says flatly. “Of course.”

He makes his breakfast under Julian’s sharp gaze. He eats his breakfast under Julian’s sharp gaze. He washes his plate under Julian’s sharp gaze.

“Can I help you?” He finally caves and asks.

Julian winks at him.

“Oh so we _good_ now.” John snaps. “We ain’t gonna talk about that, I take it.”

“Do you want to talk about it? ” Julian very politely inquires, like it’s something he’s learned to do but doesn’t quite believe in.

“Do you want to tell me what happened last night?” John mimics pettily.

“You laid down the law on me, and then I tried to start sex with you. You freaked out and ran away.”

In the basest of terms, John can’t disagree with that. And yet, “I walked out of the second most terrifying experience of my life into-. Why did you think I wanted sex?”

“After being on stage like that? I do.”

“Maybe,” John snarks, “You could have told me that while we were planning that.”

“You don’t get that soaring rush from performing?”

“Why would I? ”

Julian stares at him. “Christ.”

John wonders if Julian used one of his mannerisms intentionally.


	10. Chapter 10

John lays his maps out on one of the bar tables. The Nest, the mill house, the industrial mill, and the silo are all circled. Stacks the mill books off to the side. He looks at it all and places his face in his hands.

Julian slides in across from him.

“I can’t make 3 phase electricity. The machines probably work, but-” He shakes his head.

Julian offers, “Tabletop mill, like a meat grinder.”

“If you wanna go through every building in Charleston to find the one bastard with a table mill, then be my fucking guest because I  _don’t_ have that kind of time.”

“But you have time to build a bridge to a mill that doesn’t have power.” Julian snips back.

“I have the _means_ to do that _and_ it’s the kind of project people like.” John waves his hand. “People still get upset about breaking into homes and I don’t get it. It’s all abandoned.”

“Their loss. Can I take the motorcycle?”

“What? No.” John says, distracted before he snaps back to attention. “Wait! Give that back!”

Julian flicks his hand up over his shoulder to dangle John’s motorcycle key at him before he sashays out of the bar.

John shouts after him, “You better bring back fuel!”

There is no response. John slouches down until his forehead meets the table.

 

 

 

“So your boyfriend just took off with your motorcycle and you’re just sitting here with your nose in-” Lyle sticks his finger in the book John is using to steadfastly ignore him- “books about historic mill houses.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

Lyle raises both eyebrows at him, exaggerated. “Bro. We’ve all heard you.”

“I’m gonna have to move out.” John groans.

Lyle smirks. “You’re a big boy now, gotta get your own house.”

“Y’all live in my house.” John reminds him, joking.

“Where is he? I saw him earlier-” Lyle starts stacking up the clean glasses.

“I dared him to do something stupid. He’ll be back.”

“Just can’t get rid of him, huh?”

“Are you bar tending me?” John inquires archly.

“You need some bar tending.”

“Do I, though.”

“So you’re sure he’s coming back.” Lyle is having none of John’s redirections.

“Why do you care? I thought you didn’t trust him.”

“You turn into a sad bitch anytime he leaves.”

“I do not!” John protests sharply.

“Methink the lady doth protest too much.” Lyle snickers.

“Do not ever say that to me again.”

Lyle snaps the dirty bar towel at him.

“Gross. I can’t drive him off, apparently even when I kick him in the back while he’s down.”

“Didn’t know you were into that heavy shit.”

“I’m not but I think he is.” John sighs.

“Yikes.” Lyle offers.

“You’re so helpful.”

“Thanks, it’s what you’re paying me for.”

John stacks a couple of glasses for him. “There, now I don’t have to pay you.”

“I don’t know what to do about him. He’s gonna leave permanently without warning and-” John rubs his face- “I _am_ enjoying the company. Despite everything.”

“Mm.” Lyle prompts him to continue.

“I’m trying to not, I don’t know, it’s like a dream but shit keeps happening and waking me up.”

“Bro. This is why you’re divorced. You can’t just pretend it’s fine; you gotta talk about it.”

“Laura was too good for me.” John sighs. “Everything Julian says is fucking incomprehensible. He’s literally from another world, Lyle! Vampire cars! Blood gods!”

Lyle looks at him, using all of his steadying large jock-ness. “You know that saying about sticking your dick in the crazy?”

John holds up a hand. “I have not stuck my dick in him.”

“That is way more than I ever wanted to know, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” John says magnanimously.

“Anyway, John, you’re balls deep in the crazy.”

“Yep.” It comes out flatter than he meant it too; feeling all the crazy inside his own head like it’ll overwhelm Julian’s crazy.

“So what are you gonna do when he leaves? Go berserk? Become a hermit? Be depressed and piss off everyone who gives a damn about you?”

“Dunno.”

“That’s sure a plan.”

“Sure. Wanna help me build a bridge? It’ll be fun!” It’ll be a distraction, is what it will be and they both know it.

Lyle agrees happily enough, “Just what I wanted, heavy labor in the sun.”

 

 

 

 

John doesn’t sleep. He’d fucked up. Gotten complacent. Gotten used to having Julian beside him while he sleeps. Sucking up comfort he doesn’t deserve.

He ends up out on the bus, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the flickering lights in the clouds on the horizon.

How did this become his life?

The invasion set him free from his past. All his mistakes, all his problems- in whose eyes?

The people he’s protecting now. By god, he’s full of piss and whiskey, and these people would turn on him a week after the war is won.

He’s making the same mistakes as he did Before and it’s all in his head. They don’t care, except for the ones who that do. Did.

He shrugs the blanket tighter.

Julian is out  _there_ somewhere under the harsh moon-cloud sky and he is  _here_ . He wonders if he got up on top of the buildings and looked out over the city if he’d be able to find him. Pick the lights of the motorcycle out of the dark streets.

He didn’t expect- he didn’t expect that Julian would range out and not come back for the night.

John rubs a thumb over the cross on his chest. Falls asleep hoping that he won’t ever have to recover that motorcycle and then hotwire it because he can’t find Julian to- recover the keys. That his luck hasn’t run out yet.

Behind him, the horizon lights up with a flash. It is a different color.

He does not see it.


End file.
